BCOP and the Housing Ombudsman
As a social landlord, BCOP are members of the Housing Ombudsman service
What is the Housing Ombudsman service?
The Housing Ombudsman is an independent, impartial, and free service for social housing residents whose aim is to improve residents’ lives and landlords’ services through housing complaints.
The ombudsman makes final decisions on disputes between residents and landlords who are members, which include social landlords (housing associations and local authorities), as well as some voluntary members (private landlords and letting agents).
They also work to strengthen internal complaints procedures and encourage landlords to learn from complaints to prevent service failures being repeated.
You can read about the work of the Housing Ombudsman here, or there’s a short video about them here.
What is the complaint handling code?
Because BCOP is a member, we must comply with their complaint handling code, which sets out specific requirements. Following this code enables BCOP to resolve complaints raised by residents quickly and to learn from complaints to improve our services for tenants. It sets out best practice for complaint handling procedures, to enable a positive complaints culture across the social housing sector, regardless of the size or type of landlord. It encourages good relationships between landlord and tenant so that residents can raise a complaint if things go wrong.
A new Complaint Handling Code (‘the Code’) became statutory on 1 April 2024, meaning that all members of the Housing Ombudsman Scheme are obliged by law to follow its requirements.
The Housing Ombudsman also has a legal duty to ensure landlords complaint procedures and responses are compliant with the Code.
There’s a lot more information about the code on their website here, or there’s a short video explaining how it works here.
How does the code affect BCOP tenants?
Because no landlord is perfect, we know that sometimes things can go wrong, or that we may have missed something that you feel is important. A complaint does not need to be ‘official’ to be important to us. We need the opportunity to improve things, so please contact your tenant support officer, housing officer or the housing manager who will then contact you to confirm what kind of service you are requesting (eg making a change to how we do something, or a repair/alteration we haven’t completed). This would be noted as a service request.
If you are unhappy with how something has been dealt with, or the way a repair or service request was handled, you can then raise a complaint through our complaints procedure. This complies with the new Housing Ombudsman code. Any expression of dissatisfaction is classed as a complaint as we want to be able to use your views and experience as a way to improve our services. We are always looking for ways to improve, so welcome feedback – both positive and negative – and would encourage residents to make complaints should they feel unhappy about any element of our service.
The Housing Ombudsman code ensures that if you have made a complaint and feel unhappy or dissatisfied with the outcome, you may escalate the issue to the Ombudsman who will look at the case independently. BCOP has to abide by any resolutions ordered by the Ombudsman.
New information on our website
You’ll now be able to see information about how BCOP handles all complaints published on our website. This includes our compliments, comments and complaints policy, an annual self-assessment and a report from our Board of Trustees about how we’ve done as an organisation to improve our service.
You can see all this information on our publications page here.