Putting things right: our response to the Housing Ombudsman

The Housing Ombudsman carried out an investigation into L&Q’s complaints handling earlier this year and has now published a report highlighting their findings and recommendations.

The report highlights several cases where L&Q let down our residents and did not deliver the service they deserve. We recognise that we’ve got things wrong, and we are truly sorry for this.

Our senior leadership team is personally contacting the residents whose complaints were investigated to apologise for the completely unacceptable service they have received and to make sure we are learning from their experiences.

What really matters to us is putting things right for residents and using the report’s learnings to correct historic failings, continue building a resident-centred culture, and ensure we deliver a quality service every time.

The Ombudsman’s investigation draws conclusions from complaints made between March 2019 and October 2022. In 2021 we put in place a new five-year improvement and investment plan, developed through listening to residents, which is focused on the safety and quality of existing homes and services.

The Ombudsman has endorsed this plan, and we will be working with both them and our residents to further strengthen, accelerate and embed the positive changes we’re making.

In the meantime, here are some highlights of the improvements we are already making to ensure that every resident receives the quality homes and reliable, repeatable and consistent services they deserve:

• We’re putting resident voice at the heart of our decision-making. We published a report in May 2023 setting out how we will put residents in control of the decisions that affect them. This builds on what we’ve already done to place residents at the top of our governance through our resident-led Resident Services Board, regional committees, and 600-strong body of involved residents.

• In 2021 we implemented a new patch-based, localised housing management approach that has put 30% more colleagues ‘on the ground’ in communities so L&Q can get to know residents better, proactively manage our homes and neighbourhoods, and be more responsive to the needs of vulnerable residents. When we made this change we involved a panel of residents in the recruitment process for our new team, to make sure that they had the resident-focused approach needed for the role.

• In 2022 we launched a £3 billion, 15-year Major Works Investment Programme that will make sure every resident’s home is a safe, sustainable and decent place to live, and also drive down repairs. In 2022/23 alone we installed more than 1,500 new bathrooms, 1,400 new kitchens, 260 new roofs, and almost 2,800 new windows.

• We deliver 400,000 repairs a year, and in 2022 we launched a Repairs Change Project to improve the quality and responsiveness of our repairs service, aiming to deliver more repairs each day and offer residents a first-time-fix as often as possible – we have already improved our first-time-fix rate by 20%.
  
  
• We are overhauling our complaints handling approach, investing in additional staff and training to promote efficiency and good communication, and make sure we are learning from complaints.

• We have made significant improvements to how we prevent, identify and tackle damp and mould in residents’ homes through our Healthy Homes Project, which has already carried out more than 20,000 home visits and installed nearly 14,000 humidity sensors.

• We're making major investments in new housing management systems and technologies that will improve how we manage information and communicate with residents, and in particular vulnerable residents who may need different types of support.
  
  
• We have established an extensive training programme for our resident-facing colleagues to help us ensure that we are listening to residents and responding to them with respect and care.

You can read the Ombudsman’s full report, including their recommendations for L&Q on the Housing Ombudsman website. We will be providing residents with regular updates on our progress towards improvement.