Housing Ombudsman Self Assessment

The Housing Ombudsman’s Complaint Handling Code must be self-assessed against on an annual basis, or if there are significant changes within the housing association or local authority. The self-assessment document is provided by the Housing Ombudsman and asks landlords to provide evidence and an explanation for compliance or non-compliance.

The self-assessment document is one of the tools the Housing Ombudsman used to measure our compliance as part of their statutory duty to monitor participating landlords. This Annual Service Improvement Report is also one of those documents used to measure compliance.

In previous years, our self-assessments have been available on our website for interested parties to view, however, this year all social landlords must also submit the self-assessments to the Housing Ombudsman for scrutiny.

We have completed our annual self-assessment against the Complaint Handling Code (April 2024). You can read our full assessment here.

In preparation for the updated code becoming statutory on 1st April 2024, we completed an initial review of the self-assessment, and our leadership team were presented with the findings at the end of March 2024. Through this review we highlighted some areas where we could strengthen our Complaint Policy and relevant supporting documents.

We made the following changes in preparation of the new code becoming statutory:

• Arranged complaints training with our Customer Team  

• Added damp and mould as a service request option on My Account  

• Amended our surveys to include a complaint statement  

• Met with our ICT Business Application Analyst to start the process of building a new system to record learnings from complaints.  

• Put our compliments and complaints leaflet on the mhs website.  

• In the final stages of developing the Individual Needs Policy  

• Wrote to contractors to remind them of their duty to pass complaints to us to handle.  

• Completed an Equality Impact Assessment for our Complaints Policy  

• Arranging for all staff to have mandatory training modules on the basics of complaints and their duty to report complaints to the correct team

• Included complaint handling in the objectives of complaint handlers in their appraisals.   

We have fully complied with each of the code requirements and have provided relevant commentary. We have also given explanations where we may be making improvements to better demonstrate our compliance.   

Should you want to discuss the self-assessment or supporting documents, then please get in contact with us by emailing complaints@mhs.org.uk or by using a method that suits you best.