Camden Council (202307748)

REPORT

COMPLAINT 202307748

Camden Council

13 May 2024

Our approach

The Housing Ombudsman’s approach to investigating and determining complaints is to decide what is fair in all the circumstances of the case. This is set out in the Housing Act 1996 and the Housing Ombudsman Scheme (the Scheme). The Ombudsman considers the evidence and looks to see if there has been any ‘maladministration’, for example whether the landlord has failed to keep to the law, followed proper procedure, followed good practice or behaved in a reasonable and competent manner.

Both the resident and the landlord have submitted information to the Ombudsman and this has been carefully considered. Their accounts of what has happened are summarised below. This report is not an exhaustive description of all the events that have occurred in relation to this case, but an outline of the key issues as a background to the investigation’s findings.

The complaint

1. The complaint is about the landlord’s handling of:
   1. The resident’s reports of damp and mould in the property.
   2. The assessment of the resident’s housing register application.

Jurisdiction

1. What the Ombudsman can and cannot consider is called the Ombudsman’s jurisdiction. This is governed by the Scheme. When a complaint is brought to this Service, the Ombudsman must consider all the circumstances of the case, as there are sometimes reasons why a complaint will not be investigated.

The care and support package

2. The Housing Ombudsman Scheme (the Scheme) states at paragraph 42(j) that this Service may not consider complaints which, in the Ombudsman’s opinion, fall properly within the jurisdiction of another Ombudsman, regulator or complaint handling body. 
3. The resident complained about the landlord’s handling of her social housing register application. In this case, the landlord is linked to a local authority, and social housing applications and the awarding of points in support of social housing allocations are dealt with by the local authority not the landlord. They, therefore, fall within the jurisdiction of the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman. For that reason, this Service will not investigate this element of the complaint. In this report, reference to the resident’s concerns about housing allocations is made for background purposes only.

Background

4. The resident lives at the property as a secure tenant of the landlord.
5. The resident reported damp and mould at the property in August 2022. The landlord arranged for a survey in September 2022 and received a damp and mould report on 3 October 2022, which found some mould in a bedroom and damp in the bathroom. It found that the likely cause of the damp in the bedroom was a leak coming either from a flat roof or a blocked drain. The survey recommended works to address this leak and the installation of extractor fans in the bathroom and WC to reduce condensation. The landlord arranged for works which began in December 2022 and continued into 2023. It appointed an independent contractor to carry out the works in January 2023.
6. In March 2023, a dispute between the landlord and the resident led the landlord to suspend work at the property. On 14 April 2023, the resident complained formally to the landlord about its handling of her reports of damp and mould at the property and delays to the repair process. On 16 May 2023, the landlord commissioned a further damp and mould inspection. This inspection found condensation and mould in the bathroom. The landlord continued with remedial works in May and June 2023.
7. The landlord provided a complaint response on 17 July 2023. It apologised for the late response and accepted that there had been unacceptable delay between the damp survey and the completion of the works. It offered the resident £240 in compensation. She asked to escalate her on 23 July 2023,stating that she thought the apology was insincere and rude and the complaint response had been late. The landlord responded at stage 2 on 22 August 2023. It did not alter its decision from stage 1 and said the offer of compensation remained open.
8. The resident was not satisfied with the landlord’s response and asked this Service to investigate. She would like to be allocated another property because of the ongoing damp and mould at the property.

Assessment and findings

Scope of the investigation

9. The resident says there has been a problem with damp and mould at the property for some time. However, this Service has seen no evidence that she raised the matter with the landlord in the 2 years prior to August 2022. This investigation therefore focuses on events between August 2022 and August 2023 when the landlord provided its stage 2 complaint response. This is because the Scheme says, at paragraph 42(c), that we may not look at complaints which are not brought within a reasonable time. This means that residents should generally complain within a year of an event they wish to complain about. This reflects the fact that it becomes more difficult to effectively investigate complaints as time passes.

The resident’s reports of damp and mould at her property

10. The landlord is responsible under the tenancy agreement for repairing the structure and exterior of the property.
11. This Service has issued a report, Spotlight on Damp and Mould in which the Ombudsman said that landlords should take a “zero tolerance” approach to damp and mould. The landlord has responded to this report and says it treats damp and mould as a priority.
12. The resident reported that there was damp and mould at the property in August 2022. The landlord arranged for a survey. The records show that it attended twice and was unable to gain access before it successfully surveyed the property in September 2022. The survey found that there was damp and mould some of which was caused by condensation. It believed that this was partly due to the number of people who sometimes stayed at the property. It therefore advised the resident to open windows to allow ventilation. It also commissioned works to investigate and repair problems with a flat roof or a drain downpipe which were causing damp and mould in one of the bedrooms as these seemed to be caused by water entering from above.
13. The landlord arranged for a contractor to attend in December 2022 to clear the drain and remove debris from the roof. The contractor stated that it had unblocked the drain which contained leaves and other debris. These, in addition to its actions mentioned in the paragraph above, were appropriate measures carried out in a reasonable timescale which were proportionate to the nature and scale of the resident’s reports and the surveyor’s findings.
14. In January 2023, the landlord raised a job for further internal and external works at the property. These included the repair of the drain and the installation of extractor fans in the bathroom and kitchen. It appointed a single contractor to carry out all the works. These were appropriate and reasonable steps taken by the landlord to resolve the damp and mould at the property because they were a response to the findings of the damp inspection.
15. The landlord did not consider the works to be urgent. It therefore set a completion date of June 2023. That is a judgment the landlord made on the facts it based this decision on the information it had at the time and while, in hindsight, on the information it had, there was no reason to believe that there was a great need for urgency. This Service has seen no evidence to suggest that this timescale was unreasonable. There is no record in the survey report that the surveyor considered the problem to be severe or to require immediate action. Therefore, on the evidence, the landlord appears to have treated the problem sufficiently seriously and set a reasonable timeframe for completion. 
16. In March 2023, there were disagreements between the landlord and the resident about the best way to carry out the interior and exterior works. The resident also wanted the landlord to state that the property posed a risk to health which it said it could not do. She was also keen to obtain a copy of the damp and mould report. She initially approached the contractor that wrote the report. It refused to provide her with a copy as its contract was with the landlord. She later approached the landlord which sent her a copy. However, all these concerns caused delays which led the landlord to temporarily suspend its plans in early March 2024.
17. The resident complained formally to the landlord about the lack of action at the property on 14 April 2023. She spoke to the landlord about her complaint in early May 2023, stating that she wanted to know whether her child’s bedroom was “uninhabitable”. She said she wanted to be given housing points which would increase her likelihood of being allocated another property.
18. The remaining interior and exterior works were carried out between mid-May and early June 2023. After the landlord attended the property on 30 May 2023 to carry out mould washing treatments at the property, the resident contacted the landlord to say the job was unsatisfactory. However, the records show that she later refused to allow workmen access to the property to check whether further works were necessary.
19. Overall, while there were some delays in carrying out the works, they were completed within the landlord’s target timeframe. The landlord tried frequently to progress the works in line with its responsibilities under the tenancy agreement. It made several appointments which for various reasons, did not succeed. Failures of communication by the landlord seem, on the evidence, to have contributed to some delay as the resident was sometimes not aware that it would be coming and was not at home.
20. In its stage 1 response to the resident’s complaint on 17 July 2023, the landlord accepted that it had taken too long to carry out the works and that it had failed to carry out a mould wash on 17 May 2023. However, it did not accept that the bedroom was “uninhabitable” as the resident claimed. It also apologised for the delay in providing the complaint response, which was provided outside the landlord’s service standard. It apologised for any distress and inconvenience caused to the resident and offered her £240 in recognition of her distress and inconvenience caused by delays to the repairs and the complaints process. 
21. The resident was not satisfied with this response for several reasons. She felt that it was late, that it had failed to address her concerns and that the apology provided was insincere and rude. She also said that the survey of September 2022 had failed to assess whether the mould in the bedroom had posed a health risk to her child who slept there. She said she did not want compensation and wanted to be rehoused.
22. In its decison on 22 August 2023, the landlord stated that it had apologised for the late response, while maintaining its position from the stage 1 response. It could not say whether the property was uninhabitable. On the evidence, this was a reasonable response. There had been no suggestion in the survey that the property was uninhabitable, and this would, in any event, have been a question for the local authority’s environmental health department.
23. On the evidence, overall, the landlord’s response to the resident’s complaint was appropriate and reasonable. It accepted that there had been delays and that its service had fallen below the required standard. It apologised and offered her £240 which was reasonable redress for that failure and the delay in responding to the complaint.

Determination

24. In accordance with paragraph 53(b) of the Scheme, the landlord made an offer of reasonable redress in relation to the resident’s reports of damp and mould at the property which, in the Ombudsman’s opinion resolves this complaint satisfactorily.
25. In accordance with paragraph 42(d) of the Scheme, the landlord’s handling of the complaint about assessment of the resident’s housing register application is outside the Ombudsman’s jurisdiction to consider.