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Clarion hit with severe maladministration judgement from ombudsman after repeated complaint-handling failures
The country’s largest housing association has been hit with a severe maladministration judgement from the Housing Ombudsman after it was found to have repeatedly failed to respond to a tenant’s complaints about widespread disrepair in her property.
In a notice put out this morning, the ombudsman served Clarion, which owns and manages 125,000 homes across the country, with its most severe rating. It concerned a case in which a resident complained that Clarion had not acted on her repeated complaints about the state of her home.
The landlord has had to pay £2,300 in compensation to the tenant.
According to the ombudsman’s release today, the resident had regularly reported a leaking roof, damp and mould, and cracks to the interior of her property, but this was met with inaction by the landlord.
The resident first complained about a delayed start to roof replacement works in November 2019, but her complaint was not escalated until four months later, after the ombudsman intervened.
It was then discovered that the landlord had not responded to a later complaint submitted by the tenant in 2020, which by then concerned additional matters such as worsening damp and mould, as well as interior cracks.
This resulted in further intervention by the ombudsman, which prompted Clarion to give a stage-one response five months after the complaint was first submitted.
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The ombudsman found that the tenant had to chase Clarion for a final response at review stage, with this coming 12 weeks after she first requested it. This was well beyond the landlord’s 20 working-day policy for such a response.
The tenant had complained to the ombudsman that the constant chasing for updates was causing “considerable trouble and frustration”.
She also stated that, during this period, she and her family were living in deteriorating conditions and the damp and mould were having a detrimental impact on her family’s health.
As a result of the investigation, the ombudsman ordered the landlord to pay additional compensation of £1,100 on top of the £1,200 it had previously offered for failing to provide adequate recognition of its service failures.
The ombudsman also ordered the landlord to respond to the resident regarding the remaining aspects of her complaint, including replacement of roof timbers which she considered to be damp and mouldy, the schedule of works and how she can make a personal injury claim.
Clarion’s repairs service came to the attention of the national media last year, after ITV found widespread disrepair issues and tenants living in squalid conditions at its Eastfields estate in Merton.
At the time, residents complained that they had made repeated calls to Clarion to fix their homes, but work had not been started. Siobhain McDonagh, MP for Mitcham and Morden, told the BBC last year that complaints about Clarion represented half of her workload.
Following these revelations and an internal report which suggested Clarion had missed several opportunities to improve conditions in the properties, the landlord rejigged its management and created a chief customer officer and a chief property officer role.
Responding to the maladministration judgement today, a Clarion spokesperson said: “We want to ensure the services we provide at Clarion are customer focused and always as effective as possible.
“This was a complex case and while our focus was on completing the repairs and keeping the resident and her family regularly updated on progress, we accept that our formal communication via the complaints process fell short of the standard our residents have a right to expect.
“It took us too long to reply to letters and we accept the ruling of the ombudsman on this basis and apologise to the resident.
“We have explored what we can learn from this case and have issued renewed guidance to staff on when to escalate an enquiry to a formal complaint. We are also piloting the introduction of resident liaison officers (RLOs) who have a specific focus on managing complex cases and seeing them through to resolution.
“Clarion has also written to every one of our residents across the country in recent months, explaining how they can make a complaint and the process for contacting the Housing Ombudsman.”
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