Housing Ombudsman’s consultation on three year plan
The Housing Ombudsman has launched a consultation on its Corporate Plan for 2022-25. Set within the context of an unprecedented increase in the volume of casework and major change in the social housing sector, the plan reinforces the changing role and importance of complaint handling. The Housing Ombudsman has experienced significant increases in demand with a 139 per cent increase in enquiries and complaints in the year to date compared with 2020-21, plus a 65 per cent increase in cases for formal investigation. Externally, the implementation of the Social Housing White Paper and future policy changes to improve access to complaints are likely to sustain increasing volumes of casework.
The Corporate Plan aims to respond to this increase in complaints and it sets out ways the Ombudsman will work with the sector to promote fairness through investigations, strengthen complaint handling, encourage learning to improve services and potentially prevent complaints.
Built around values of fairness, learning, openness and excellence, the key elements of the plan are to:
- Increase awareness of the Ombudsman’s role, together with improving access to our service for those facing barriers.
- Extend fairness through high-quality, inquisitorial and impartial investigations to establish if there was service failure with robust remedies and undertake thematic inquiries into systemic issues.
- Use proactive interventions to improve landlords’ complaint handling and support earlier, local resolution for the benefit of all residents.
- Establish a Centre for Learning to promote complaint handling excellence among social landlords by using insight from our casework, data and intelligence.