Peabody Trust (202233849)

REPORT

COMPLAINT 202233849

Peabody Trust

27 February 2025

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

The complaint is about:
1. The landlord’s decision to nominate a staff member as a point of contact and the resident’s concerns about how that member of staff managed communication.
2. The landlord’s complaint handling.

Background

The resident was the leaseholder of a flat in a block of flats. The landlord had arranged for the resident to liaise through a member of staff who will be referred to “S1” in this report.

Policy framework

Under the landlord’s unreasonable communication policy, it could appoint a single point of contact where it considered that a resident’s contact took “a disproportionate amount of its time, preventing it from dealing with the issue in question and providing a service to others”. The policy added that “a customer will be informed of any formal restrictions in writing, including the length of time they are to be in place. A note will also be placed on our records to reflect this. Customers will have the opportunity to appeal any decision to restrict their contact within ten working days. They will be informed of how to appeal in writing and will be notified of any appeal outcomes in writing. No restrictions should be in place indefinitely and will be for a set period (e.g., two, four or six months – depending on the severity of the behaviour)”.
The landlord’s complaints process has two stages. The Stage 1 response was due within 10 working days. The Stage 2 response was due within 20 days of the request for escalation.

Chronology

On 12 November 2022, the resident made a complaint as follows:
1. The resident quoted various case references at the outset of the complaint.
2. There “had been months (April to November 2022) of miscommunication”. The complaint was about misinformation and incorrect administration by a member of staff, S1. This had caused undue delays and additional emails.
3. The landlord had made “unjustified personal accusations”. She objected to phrases such as “unhelpful, obstructive and condescending”. She objected to phrases such as “as you are aware”, “as I have explained to you” and “we will not be addressing the same issues repeatedly”. She was not aware of new formal complaint legislation/procedure.
4. The landlord, and S1 in particular, had “indiscriminately” raised “formal” complaints without the resident’s agreement.
5. The landlord had requested proof of communication sent “years ago” on outstanding repairs under estate services. This had wasted “weeks of (the resident’s) time” and caused her to send “extra emails”.
6. She wanted S1 not to be the sole person that responded to her “CCL” requests.
7. She reported many of the communal repairs and chased to their completion. She was told she sent “excessive” /”duplicate” emails.
8. She wanted the landlord to:
  1. Explain why this arrangement was in place.
  2. Introduce a Key Performance Indicator (KPI) for response times and not just say “we work through our e-mail traffic in time and date order of receipt”.
  3. To raise, and proactively follow up on outstanding/overdue communal repairs and update leaseholders.
  4. Provide correct and accurate accounts on time.
On 19 November 2023, in response to an enquiry by S1, the resident provided examples of “obstructive” responses. On 27 November 2022 the resident chased her complaint. On 7 December 2022 S1 responded to the points the resident raised in her email of 19 November 2022. There followed an email exchange about webforms.
On 13 December 2022, a member of staff, whom we will refer to as S2 in this report, responded to the complaint as follows:
1. It apologised for not responding to the resident’s email of 12 November 2022 more promptly.
2. The resident had made “general, unspecified comments” about S1 being ‘unhelpful, obstructive and condescending.’
3. S1 was of its most experienced Customer Service Officers and it had “no concerns” regarding how she performed in her role. There were not grounds to raise a formal complaint and it would “not be taking this any further”. S1 would continue in the role.
4. It could not “be dictated to” in terms of how it operated as a business.
5. It asked the resident to “refrain from making any further unsubstantiated comments” about S1.
6. Some points had been addressed within other complaints she had raised.
7. The landlord responded to “all web forms and emails in a timely manner”. There were occasional situations where responses took longer “than (it) would hope”.
8. It continued to review and improve its services for residents.
9. There were “various means” to contact the landlord.
10. The Customer Hub was “an inbound contact centre”. If a customer contacted the hub to follow up on a previous enquiry, it would do “their best to assist”. It was not responsible to “case manager” repairs or enquiries.
11. Staff reported repairs daily and followed them up. They could also contact the contractor directly. The landlord post–inspected some repairs. Contractors were asked to provide photographs of their work. The landlord did not rely on its residents to report or follow up repairs. It recognised residents who lived on the premises would often notice a communal repair before its staff did.
On 24 December 2022 the resident asked to escalate the complaint to stage 2.
On 3 January 2023, S1 asked for examples of where she had blocked the resident’s queries.
On 6 January 2023 the landlord wrote with a second Stage 1 complaint response as follows:
1. It did not have a “firm KPI” regarding responding to emails. Its service standard was to respond within 5 working days to customer enquiries. Sometimes, “with regret”, it did not meet this standard. There had been a “sharp increase” in email communication. It was addressing this with training staff and increasing its capacity. It apologised for the delays, which were not due to S1 but due to resources.
2. S1 was an experienced member of the digital team. Where residents had various issues, it would assign one person to deal with all communication with that resident. The resident had fed back that she had experienced inconsistencies in the landlord’s responses. S1 was asked to consolidate the resident’s enquiries.
3. It had reviewed the responses. It did not find that S1 has been obstructive or raised or omitted to raise any case with or without her consent that had been intentionally to stop issues being resolved. S1 had cancelled duplicate cases.
4. It apologised that it had not explained the arrangement. It did not feel that S1 had mishandled queries or complaints. There was one exception where she had merged a query and complaint that it had apologised for.
5. It had made the arrangements in order to simplify, consolidate and work together more effectively on more complex issues.
6. It apologised that S2 had not raised the resident’s (initial) “report” as a complaint. It was human error. It had fed this back to S2. S2 was “fully trained and aware of the complaints process but had “just made an honest mistake”.
7. It had been difficult to identify what resolution the resident required. S1 had requested clarification. It had not found that S1 had been unreasonable in her requests.
8. It would be conducting a full review of the KPI’s of the digital team to ensure that its service continues to improve. It apologised for the delays and the inconvenience that this had caused the resident.
There followed an email exchange. The landlord’s position was that the first Stage 1 response had been defective, as it had not referred the resident to this Service. It was sending a fresh Stage 1 response and therefore Stage 1 had not concluded. The resident’s position was that the Stage 1 response was that of 13 December 2022, therefore the Stage 2 response was due on 26 January 2023.
The landlord acknowledged the resident’s request to escalate the complaint on 13 February 2023.
On 21 March 2023, the landlord wrote with its Stage 2 response as follows:
1. It apologised for the “slight delay” in responding at stage 2.
2. It apologised that it did not include details on how to escalate her complaint to stage 2 in the response of 13 December 2022. It had not identified “anything wrong” with the way S1 dealt with the resident’s contact.
3. S2 had raised complaints when it was clear she was expressing a dissatisfaction and dealt with “non-complaint related contact” appropriately.
4. It apologised for the lack of communication at stage 2, including the delay in sending the response. It was experiencing higher volumes of complaints. It was in the process of recruiting more staff who would be in post within the next 2-3 weeks.
5. It offered compensation of £75 consisting of £25 for its “minor error” at Stage 1 and £50 for its delays and poor communication at stage 2.

Assessment and findings

Scope of this investigation

We received correspondence spanning from 2020 to 2024. The resident also sent us a 18-page table of events in support of her complaint spanning a similar period. We have not investigated historical correspondence as we would expect resident to bring complaints to the landlord promptly. Equally, we do not investigate events that have not been considered in a landlord’s own complaints procedure, unless it was, for example, to follow up assurances like carrying out repairs. This is because the landlord would not have had an opportunity to respond to the resident.
The 18-page table focussed largely on delayed repairs. We note the resident made a number of complaints, such as on 23 August 2022 a request for a Legionnaire’s report and on 22 October 2022, “lack of contractor oversight and internal/external communication failings”. Communication would be an aspect of these complaints.
While the resident listed some case references within her complaint of 12 November 2022, the resident did not explain how they were relevant. The resident told us that she did not list examples of the points she made in her complaint because this was burdensome, and the landlord had also stated it would not review evidence as it was too “time consuming”. We sympathise that making a complaint is time consuming and can be stressful. However, while we have the resident’s 18-page table, we can only investigate what was put to the landlord. While we noted the case examples, we have focussed on the examples that the resident presented to the landlord in support of her complaint.
We have not investigated the resident’s report of delays to repairs. The resident’s complaint referred, in general terms, to overall delays and lack of feedback for communal repairs. This aspect did not appear to have been escalated to Stage 2. We understand the resident has raised these issues elsewhere. The resident has confirmed that the complaint she referred to this Service to be about the landlord’s complaint handling and a member of staff, namely S1. The resident did not ask us to add the repairs to our investigation. We note the resident has made complaints about the communal repairs elsewhere in any event. In the circumstances, we have not investigated that aspect of the resident’s complaint in this investigation.

The landlord’s decision to nominate a staff member as a point of contact and the resident’s concerns about how that member of staff managed communication.

The landlord’s explanation why it had nominated a specific member of staff to communicate with the resident was reasonable. It was reasonable and efficient to organise and collate the responses to the resident. It was also efficient to streamline the responses through one person. It was a way to avoid duplication in effort and responses by consolidating any duplicate correspondence and themes, and in order to ensure consistency. The correspondence showed that the resident raised a number of enquiries. The evidence we have seen indicated that there was a frequent and busy correspondence between the landlord and the resident. The resident stated that she made the majority of reports about communal repairs. The correspondence in the period from November 2022 to March 2023 alone included service charges, service standards and measuring those standards, accessing an on-line meeting, and estate inspections. The landlord was entitled to organise and streamline communication as it saw fit while ensuring that it responded to the resident’s enquiries as reasonably possible. However, the landlord should have explained this arrangement to the resident at the outset. The landlord acknowledged this.
This arrangement was not the same as a contact restriction. The landlord was not limiting the resident’s contact but streamlining it. When we asked the landlord about its contact restrictions, the landlord told us they did not apply to this case. There was no evidence that the arrangement fell under its unreasonable communication policy. There was no indication that the process the landlord’s unreasonable communication policy described applied to these events or circumstances.
We did not see any evidence of the resident’s contact with the landlord being restricted by this arrangement. The landlord explained that S1 was managing its “inbound digital contact” which we understand to mean was limited to webforms. The landlord told her that there were other means of contacting the landlord.
The evidence showed that the resident corresponded with a number of other members of staff during the period of this complaint. This included the head of the resident’s neighbourhood area (“S3”), the head of customer experience in early January 2023 and another member of the complaints team. There was correspondence from S3 on 13 December 2022 and 30 December 2022.
We concluded that the arrangement was the landlord managing the volume of resident’s queries rather than restricting them. If the landlord were to restrict contact or manage its frequency of responses, we would expect it to explain this to the resident and follow its Unreasonable Communication Procedure referred to within the policy.
The other part of the complaint is that the resident felt that S1 was blocking communication and raising complaints without being asked to do so. The resident’s table included the following examples:
1. In October 2022, we do not have the exact date, S1 responded to a complaint where it had been agreed it a senior director would respond. The landlord apologised.
2. In October 2022, the resident states that S1 did not respond to a question about a section 20 consultation.
3. The resident made a number of reports about lack of hot water in a neighbour’s property. S1 raised a complaint because “a formal complaint will provide a full review, investigation and response to these”. This may have been where the landlord acknowledged that S1 had merged a query with a complaint.
We consider these examples could have been explicitly raised during the complaint process, in particular as the landlord requested examples as S1 did on 3 January 2023. We do not consider that the case references in themselves would have been sufficiently clear without the narrative. In any event, we consider it reasonable and appropriate, and we expect landlords to consider complaints that are an expression of dissatisfaction. The evidence showed that the landlord acknowledged there had been human errors in the communication. While frustrating for the resident, we do not consider that these errors caused a significant impact.
The resident also said that S1 was taking up her time and putting the resident to unnecessary trouble asking for further information about her queries. We found it reasonable that S1 asked for details about the resident’s queries. One example was that the resident stated on 12 November 2022 that the webform had not been working since September 2022. On 14 November 2022 S1 asked for details. The reason she gave was she aware of an issue in early September 2022 which she had dealt with but none since. It was reasonable to ask what other difficulties the resident had had with the on-line form.
The evidence showed that S1 had dealt with the queries referred to in the resident’s email of 19 November 2022 of webforms not working. According to S1’s email of 7 December 2022, the webform had successfully come through to the landlord. S1 had responded to the resident’s reports about webforms of 14 August 2022, 30 October 2022, and 4 November 2022 on 23 August 2022, 4 and 14 November 2022 respectively. S1 had acknowledged receipt of webforms of 5 and 30 November 2022. In her response, the resident stated that September 2022 was not the only instance but did not provide examples. It was, in the circumstances, reasonable to close the query.
Another example of the landlord being “obstructive” the resident gave in her email of 19 November 2022 was an extract from a landlord’s email of 19 August 2022. In the email, the landlord declined to “(trawl) through any potential historic records to find what went wrong, where and who by”. The purpose, according to the resident, would have been to gather evidence of grounds maintenance work requests that were never actioned.
The landlord’s explanation that it did not do so in order to preserve resources and focus on putting things right was reasonable. It is reasonable for a landlord to decline to review its records extensively or disproportionately in order to identify instances of its failures, unless it had reason to undertake a systemic review or was provided with specifics.
We would expect the landlord to ensure it responded to reports of the repairs themselves or provide a reasonable explanation why it did not. However, we would expect the resident to provide instances when making a complaint. This would be so that the landlord could understand the issues and focus its internal investigation.
Also in her email 19 November 2022, as an example of obstructiveness, the resident raised a delay in the landlord sending a case reference. The delay was short lived and the landlord explained it. We did not find this was evidence of obstructiveness.
The evidence showed that S1 had referred queries to other members of staff including regarding the estate inspections. S3 had drafted an email from S1 of 14 November 2022. On 3 January 2023, S1 reasonably apologised that she had not make it clear that it had been drafted by S3.
We did not find evidence that the resident’s communication was blocked or that S1 had put the resident to unnecessary trouble by asking for details. We found it reasonable that the landlord sought to organise the communication and channel it through one member of staff and that member of staff asked for details of the resident’s reports and complaints. There was evidence of some errors within an extensive correspondence, which would have been frustrating for the resident. However, we find no maladministration in the landlord’s overall handling of the resident’s communication.

The landlord’s complaint handling

There was no dispute that the resident made a complaint on 12 November 2022. The landlord’s system had acknowledged the complaint with an automated message on the same day. The landlord only responded after the resident chased the landlord on 27 November 2022. The first Stage 1 response of 13 December 2022 was therefore 2 weeks late.
The landlord decided to address its omission in referring the resident to our Service by sending a fresh Stage 1 response on 6 January 2023. The landlord did not accept the request for escalation until 13 February 2023. The resident calculated that the Stage 2 response would have been due on 26 January 2023. It was sent on 21 March 2023. In the circumstances, the landlord’s approach delayed the response overall. While there was a delay, in our view. this was not evidence of the landlord blocking the resident’s complaint. We accept that the omission in the first Stage 1 response was just an “honest mistake”. The landlord recognised its delay and omission and offered £75 by way of compensation. We found this resolved that aspect of the landlord’s complaint handling.
The response of 13 December 2022 could have been more helpful and adopted a more positive approach. Rather than simply stating the resident’s comments were “unsubstantiated”, the landlord could have requested detail as did S1. It could have, for example, explained its decisions in neutral terms and what steps the resident or landlord could take if the customer hub did not have the answers.
The second Stage 1 response set out a full explanation as to why S1 was nominated to deal with the resident’s queries. It confirmed S2 had received training. It set out the timescales for responding to queries and managed expectations by explaining it did not always meet the standard. It explained its delays and how it was addressing this. It acknowledged this should have been explained to the resident. It had carried out a review of S1 responses. It was positive that the landlord took on board the resident’s comments and would review the performance of the digital team.
The Stage 2 response reasonably reviewed the complaint, and while it did not add much to the substance, it made an offer of compensation for the complaint handling failures identified.
In the circumstances, we find that by its apologies, explanations and offer of compensation, the landlord offered reasonable redress in relation to the landlord’s complaint handling.

Determination

In accordance with Paragraph 52 of the Housing Ombudsman Scheme, there was no maladministration in relation to the resident’s complaint about how the landlord managed its communication with the resident including its decision to nominate a staff member as a point of contact and how that staff member managed communication.
In accordance with Paragraph 53.b of the Housing Ombudsman Scheme, in the Ombudsman’s view, there was an offer of reasonable redress in relation to the landlord’s complaint handling.