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Complaints hold a mirror up to our organisations, so we must learn from them
Ruth Cooke, chief executive of GreenSquareAccord, responds to the findings of the Housing Ombudsman’s investigation into the association’s complaint-handling
Ruth Cooke is chief executive of GreenSquareAccord
It’s hard to think of many things more important to someone than their home and we all know how it feels when something goes wrong with our own. Nobody who works in social housing wants this to happen to their customers so when it does, it is always painful to see the impact and often sobering to see what led to it.
The reality, as it is for all large organisations providing services to significant numbers of people, is that there will be times when we do get things wrong. In such cases, it is crucial we investigate quickly, address the situation and identify what we can do to prevent it from happening again.
While it’s easy to see a failure as an isolated case, complaints actually offer a much more fundamental test – they hold a mirror up to our organisations.
In September 2023, we were told by the Housing Ombudsman that it would be conducting a Paragraph 49 investigation into our complaint-handling after making a number of severe maladministration determinations against us.
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The announcement by the ombudsman followed a period in which the ambitions we set ahead of our merger in April 2021, which would’ve seen us make transformational improvements for our customers, had to take a back seat while we shifted our priorities to enable us to address building safety issues identified in the immediate aftermath. As part of this work, as is so often the case, we identified broader issues leading us to fundamentally change our strategy in April 2023 to focus on our existing homes and services.
I have written previously about the opportunity this gave us to fundamentally rethink our priorities and renew our focus on getting things right for our customers. While this mission was not complete by the time the ombudsman announced its investigation, much of the work had been completed by then and we learned in November 2023 that we had regained our G1 governance rating from the Regulator of Social Housing.
“Like our downgrade, we saw this investigation first and foremost as an opportunity to learn”
It is perhaps unsurprising that many of the complaints which led to the ombudsman investigation date back to the post-merger period and are rooted in service failings we had recognised and already started to address. But while this provides context, it isn’t an excuse. This doesn’t help the customers who received a poor service and who had to complain to the ombudsman to get their issues resolved. It also doesn’t mean there is nothing left for us to learn or isn’t more for us to do to improve things for our customers.
That’s why, like our downgrade, we saw this investigation first and foremost as an opportunity to learn. The most important thing for us from the outset was to fully co-operate with the Housing Ombudsman, so that we could use the learning from this process to drive further improvements and ensure the service our customers receive reflects our fundamental commitment to them.
As we had already discovered from the work we have done to learn from complaints and improve our response to service failure, we can see we got things wrong; very wrong in some cases and this has the power to demonstrate what we need to change like nothing else. In reality, that is about so much more than procedures and processes and the nuts and bolts of complaint-handling – although these are of course all important.
It’s about culture – about us stating clearly our expectations for our colleagues and ensuring this is reflected in the day-to-day experience of our customers. It’s also about strategic direction, having clearly stated and deliverable ambitions and the level of investment to make tangible improvements for our customers.
A commitment to our customer is enshrined in our organisation and this investigation has supplemented our own learning from complaints and represented an important opportunity for us to scrutinise how we are progressing against our renewed ambition and the changes we had made to improve how we handle complaints and our wider service offer.
“As hard as it may be for us to hear about the times we’ve got it wrong, it is much harder for our customers to experience it”
It’s great that the ombudsman has recognised our progress and noted we have done crucial work to rethink our strategy, start to embed a customer-centric culture in our organisation and improve our response to complaints. But the job isn’t done. The report also notes we need to continue to drive improvements and there is more learning, which we will now take forward.
Complaints have the power to highlight where we need to improve like nothing else, and sometimes we need an independent view of what’s gone wrong to identify further opportunities for improvement. This investigation has given us that.
As hard as it may be for us to hear about the times we’ve got it wrong, it is much harder for our customers to experience it. When this happens, we must listen and respond – it’s what everyone living in our homes deserves.
Ruth Cooke, chief executive, GreenSquareAccord
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