Stonewater Limited (202215713)

REPORT

COMPLAINT 202215713

Stonewater Limited

30 June 2023

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 concerns the landlord’s handling of repairs to the resident’s bathroom.

Background

2. The resident is an assured tenant of the landlord. The property is a flat in a communal building.
3. The resident has explained that she has experienced ongoing issues with the condition of her bathroom since at least 2017. The landlord’s repair logs state that the bathroom floor was replaced in March 2018. However, the resident continued to report issues with the bathroom, including a leak under the flooring and problems with the shower.
4. The resident attempted to raise a complaint into the matter on 22 December 2020 and again in January 2021. However, there is no evidence that the landlord logged them.
5. The landlord sent a complaint acknowledgement on 3 March 2021, but a complaint response was provided until the landlord sent a stage one complaint response on 5 July 2021. It acknowledged that her original complaint had not been responded to, apologised for the poor service the resident received, informed her an inspection of her property had been arranged for 12 July 2021 and offered £200 compensation. The inspection was cancelled due to the resident’s household isolating after experiencing Covid symptoms.
6. On 9 June 2022 the resident called the landlord and asked it to rebook the inspection and informed it that the condition of the bathroom had worsened. The resident also disputed the resolution offered in the stage one complaint response, declined the compensation offer and requested an escalation of the complaint. The landlord sent a stage two complaint response on 6 October 2022 and then sent a follow-up stage two complaint response on 28 December 2022. In its responses the landlord:
   1. Recognised that there had been significant delays in completing the work and errors in its communication with the resident. The landlord apologised to the resident for its service failures.
   2. Explained that a joint inspection by the landlord and its contractor of the bathroom found the flooring to be of a good standard and that the source of the leak was from a loose fitting between the toilet pan and cistern.
   3. Confirmed that work to replace the toilet and repair the water damage the leak had caused had been completed, and that it would arrange a date with the resident to undertake a post-work inspection.
   4. Informed the resident that as a result of her complaint, it was making changes in how it progressed its stage two complaints to ensure they were provided within its published timescales, and also in how it acted on information it received from its contractors to ensure it was accurate. The landlord acknowledged it had provided inaccurate information in some of its complaint responses as a result of not checking the information given to it by its contractor.
   5. Offered the resident £1,652.59 compensation, which it broke down as:
      1. £300 for its poor level of service.
      2. £200 for the inconvenience caused to the resident.
      3. £250 for its poor communication.
      4. £300 for the delays in resolving the issue.
      5. £200 for the delay in providing the stage two response.
      6. £402,59 in recognition of the loss of facilities (30% rent refund for 13 weeks).
7. The post-work inspection held on 26 January 2023 recommended follow-on work to install a larger base to the toilet and replace water damaged internal doors. This was completed on 15 May 2023. The landlord then wrote to the resident on 23 May 2023 and informed her that it had reviewed its compensation offer. It noted that the £402.59 it had offered for loss of facilities had not taken into account the inconvenience caused to the resident and her family in having to travel to another family member’s property in order to shower. It offered the resident an additional £350 for this aspect (in its letter it referred to this inconsistently as either £350 or £250, this investigation is assuming it meant £350) making a total compensation offer of £2,002.59.

Assessment and findings

Relevant policies and procedures.

8. The landlord’s repairs policy categorises its repair types as “Emergency” (make safe within 24 hours) and “By Appointment” (at a time and date agreed with the tenant). The landlord defines an emergency repair as a repair that “could pose immediate danger or cause serious damage” and by appointment repairs as “repairs which do not pose an immediate risk to health or safety”.

Investigation scope

9. The resident informed this Service that she had been reporting problems with the bathroom and a potential leak since 2019. However, having viewed the landlord’s contact records, although there were records of issues being reported with the shower in 2017 and it being repaired, and then the floor being replaced in 2018, there were no further reports about the bathroom recorded until August 2020. The resident did not raise a formal complaint until December 2020. Therefore, this assessment will focus on the period from August 2020 till the end of the internal complaints process in December 2022. This is because the Housing Ombudsman Scheme requires a resident to make a formal complaint to their landlord within a reasonable period of the issue arising, which is usually considered to be six months. Accordingly, while we have used our discretion to consider events from August 2020, the years prior to that are too old to be considered in this investigation.
10. The resident has provided updates to this Service about recent repair efforts with her bathroom. This investigation centres on the events leading up to the resident’s formal complaint in 2020, and beyond that to the landlord’s follow-up work and further compensation offer in May 2023. Any issues or concerns the resident has in relation to events after that period need to be raised with the landlord as a new formal complaint – even if the matters are broadly connected to the subjects of this investigation. Once the resident has exhausted the landlord’s complaints process with her new complaint, it remains open to her to return to the Ombudsman if she remains dissatisfied.

Repairs to the bathroom

11. Once the landlord received the resident’s reports about the condition of the bathroom, it had a duty to respond to the issue in line with its obligations set out in the tenancy agreement and its published policies and procedures. It is noted that when the resident reported that there was a problem with her bathroom floor in August 2020, the United Kingdom was in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic and the landlord’s services and response timeframes were affected by the restrictions put in place by the Government as part of the national lockdowns. Therefore, although the industry standard timeframe for non-urgent repairs is 28 days, it is not unreasonable for repairs during the pandemic to have taken longer. However, once the resident reported on 26 November 2020 that the shower was tripping the electrics and that she suspected this could be related to a possible leak under the flooring, the landlord responded appropriately by arranging an urgent appointment to investigate this within 24 hours, in line with its repairs policy.
12. The events from this point are not clear due to repair records that do not clearly record every visit or cancelled visit. One record on 7 December 2020 refers to the bathroom flooring being replaced on 9 December but another note on 25 January 2021 refers to the bathroom flooring having been replaced on 15 January 2021 but needing further repair. However, there are no repair records for 15 January. What is clear is that the resident continued to experience issues with her bathroom, both the flooring and the shower itself and contacted the landlord on numerous occasions from November 2020 until June 2021 when the landlord raised a complaint and agreed to send out a surveyor.
13. The surveyor’s inspection was cancelled due to the resident’s household isolating. There is no evidence that the landlord sought to rebook the inspection until the resident raised the issue in June 2022. However, while the landlord would be expected to have rebooked the appointment, it should be noted that there is no evidence that the resident requested the appointment to be rebooked or reported any further issues with the bathroom prior to her 9 June 2022 telephone call.
14. In its two stage two complaint responses, the landlord acknowledged that the resident had received a poor service and that the time it took it to complete the repairs and the communication the resident received was not acceptable. Therefore, it was appropriate for the landlord to apologise to the resident, offer compensation and explain what steps it had taken to improve its service. This is in line with the Ombudsman’s Dispute Resolution Principles of: be fair, put things right and learn from outcomes.
15. The landlord acted fairly in acknowledging its mistakes and apologising to the resident. It put things right by completing repairs to the bathroom and offering £1,802.59 compensation, and a further £200 for its delayed complaint handling. It looked to learn from its mistakes by improving its internal communication procedures. The landlord informed the resident in its stage two complaint response that it had made changes to how it corresponds with its contractors to ensure the information it receives is correct.
16. The landlord’s compensation policy states that when calculating compensation offers, it refers to the Ombudsman’s own remedies guidance. This recommends a payment of £100 to £600 in cases of considerable service failure or maladministration by a landlord. This includes distress and inconvenience, time and trouble, disappointment, loss of confidence, and delays in getting matters resolved. The guidance also recommends a payment of £600 to £1,000 in cases of maladministration or severe maladministration which has had a significant impact on a resident. The landlord’s final offer of £1,802.59 recognised the significant delay in identifying the source of the leak in the bathroom, the further delay in completing all repairs to the bathroom, the poor level of service and communication the resident experienced, and the inconvenience caused to the resident’s household by the loss of facilities. It was appropriate in the circumstances and exceeded the amount of compensation the Ombudsman might have ordered if the landlord had not already made an offer. Therefore, the landlord has provided reasonable redress to the resident, and the measures it took to redress what went wrong were proportionate to the impact of its failures.

Determination

17. In accordance with paragraph 53(b) of the Housing Ombudsman Scheme, the landlord has offered redress to the resident prior to investigation which, in the Ombudsman’s opinion, resolves the complaint satisfactorily.

Recommendations

18. As the finding of reasonable redress was made based on the landlord’s total compensation of £2002.59, it is recommended that this is now paid to the resident, if the landlord has not done so already.