A new lease of life – the latest report from the Housing Ombudsman Service

The role of shared ownership within the social housing sector continues to evolve and grow. There are some important lessons to learn from the experiences of residents so far. About one in five complaints handled by the Housing Ombudsman are made by shared owners or leaseholders. We’ve examined almost 2,000 cases received between 2018-20, including more than 800 formal investigations, and produced a report - A new lease of life - telling the stories of 14 residents and made almost 40 recommendations for improved practice.

The overriding message to board members and frontline staff alike is that shared ownership and leasehold needs distinct recognition within social landlords, who should organise and operate differently to make it work. The report also identifies 12 landlords with the highest numbers of maladministration findings.

Indeed, I would encourage you to read about the experiences of the 14 residents which are retold in the report. In some cases, they show how landlords have used their complaints procedure to effectively address their residents’ concerns. In the case of Ms C, for instance, her landlord provided a comprehensive breakdown of their service charges following her complaint, which resulted in a finding of reasonable redress by us. However, the report also highlights examples of poor practice. One such case is where Ms A’s flat experienced such severe water damage over a two year period that some of the door frames warped because the landlord did not follow its obligations under the lease. Another describes how Mr Y waited almost two years for his staircasing request to be completed because of record keeping so poor the lease hadn’t even been registered with the Land Registry.

What did we find goes wrong most often? About four in ten investigations resulted in some form of maladministration (including partial and severe maladministration), with the top areas for maladministration being complaint handling (26%), repairs (20%), estate management (11%) and service charges (10%). However, the area of consistent concern was complaint handling itself, where we found maladministration in 72% of relevant cases. There may be a number of reasons for this: cases can be complex with a number of parties involved; there can be a lack of clarity around who is responsible for what, poor recording keeping or ineffective systems; and issues can be exacerbated by staff turnover, lack of communication between internal teams, mergers and stock transfers resulting in a plethora of different lease agreements.

So, what do we recommend? Foremost we strongly encourage landlords to consider ways to improve lease agreements at the outset. They must also strengthen systems and improve approaches to capturing and sharing knowledge and information within organisations, especially between development and operational teams. Together, these actions will enable more timely responses that recognise the impact on residents. It is in the sector’s interest as a whole to make these things work better, and therefore we would urge it to collaborate on developing approaches in these areas. Our report also makes recommendations to respond effectively to new build defects, capturing and using customer satisfaction ratings for contractor repair performance, greater transparency on service charges when invoicing and developing staff understanding of the products they are selling.

In producing this report, we want to share learning and improvement across the sector, and to support this we plan to hold two webinars with experts at the Housing Ombudsman who helped to produce the report. They will discuss it and answer your questions. It is part of our service to do more to share our insights, support landlords to develop their services and improve the experiences of residents.