The Housing Ombudsman has begun consultation on its 2024-25 business plan. The business plan covers the final year of the Ombudsman's 2022-25 Enterprise Plan and aims to deliver an independent, visible and proactive service to social housing residents and landlords.
With the additional resources, the Ombudsman is expected to double the number of investigations completed in 2023-24 compared to the previous year. decision This consultation occurs approximately every 20 minutes. The consultation follows a record year of complaints such as:
- Cases received by us increased by 91% in the first nine months of 2023-2024 (compared to the same period last year)
- be Mismanagement 72% by Q3 (59% in 2022-23)
- compensation £3.7m by Q3 (compared with £1.1m for the whole of 2022-23)
- Through the third quarter, we found more than 14,000 remedies (compared to 6,500 a year ago).
Next year will be a pivotal year for the housing sector, with much of the Social Housing (Regulation) Act coming into force, including active consumer regulation and legal obligations to comply with the Ombudsman Complaints Handling Code.
In light of these changes and the significant increase in demand, the business plan will see the Ombudsman work to improve local grievance procedures, implement the remaining new powers, and carry out the remaining work of the strategic program. It sets out how the role will develop.
In its 2024-25 Business Plan, the Ombudsman continues to focus on expanding its casework activities and leveraging its systematic activities to help improve landlord services.
The Ombudsman will use this consultation to seek views on what learning tools it can provide to help landlords improve their complaints handling, and support for changes to the fee structure to encourage better complaints handling. is testing.
Overall, 2024-2025 is likely to be a difficult year for social landlords, and as a result the Ombudsman expects demand to continue to increase by 50% to 80% compared to 2023-24. Masu.
2024-25 Business Plan Discussion PDF
Richard Blakeway, Housing Ombudsman“Public housing is vitally important to residents and society as a whole and our work aims to strengthen it, but given our casework and the volume of complaints we receive, the situation It is clear how difficult it has become.”
“As the volume of complaints continues to grow, we are looking at how we can use this business plan to drive learning and improvement in our complaints process.
“This will allow landlords to resolve more complaints within their own complaints process, provide faster resolution to residents, and improve landlord-resident relationships. With new legal powers, we are looking at how we can use them to improve our landlord service and culture.
“The significant work of the new statutory grievance provisions will significantly strengthen our efforts to monitor compliance and ensure that residents no longer suffer from poor and inconsistent grievance procedures.
“Our focus on helping landlords learn and access the tools they need to deal with complaints more effectively means that all landlords, especially a significant proportion of residents, It will help landlords who are coming to the rescue get through what is shaping up to be a difficult year.”
Please fill out the business plan consultation form
Consultations will be accepted until Friday, April 5th.
