Yorkshire family “forced to eat Christmas dinner on the floor” after landlord inaction on property condition: Housing Ombudsman

The Housing Ombudsman has called on Yorkshire Housing to pay £3,780 after making three findings of severe maladministration for how the landlord handled reports of a leak, damp and mould, complaint handling, and considering the resident’s welfare.

The Ombudsman said Yorkshire Housing was aware of the resident’s poor mental health yet failed to take appropriate action to support the resident during their move to temporary accommodation because of the condition of their property following a leak.

The Ombudsman’s investigation found the landlord neglected to follow its own decant policy, with the emergency decant causing significant challenges to the resident. Its repairs policy for vulnerable residents was also not adequately implemented, failing to consider the needs of the resident and provide the necessary support to the resident, who had two young children under six years old at the time.

“The lack of communication and support from the landlord further exacerbated the resident’s anxiety, distress, and feeling of being forgotten about,” the Ombudsman said.

“In addition to these failures, the resident’s initial complaint was ignored, and a stage 2 complaint remained unanswered, leading to the perception that the resident was unimportant, and that the landlord did not care.”

The Ombudsman said the landlords’ contractors were often depending on the resident to return to their property before they could complete necessary repairs. As a result, the resident experienced frequent disruptions and distress, especially since they were working from home during the national lockdowns.

The resident had repeatedly informed the landlord about the negative impact on her mental health caused by the events, lack of communication, and support. She reported that, because of the temporary accommodation the household was moved to, she was “eating their Christmas dinner on the floor” and “sleeping on mattresses for months”.

The Ombudsman found that this should have prompted the landlord to consider additional support for the vulnerable resident, but no such action was taken.

“The landlord’s poor communication, oversight, and heavy-handed approach was particularly detrimental to a resident with mental health vulnerabilities, especially during a pandemic and multiple national lockdowns,” it said.

Yorkshire Housing’s complaint handling was also considered to be poor, with significant delays in response times.

The Ombudsman said a senior member of staff from Yorkshire Housing should apologise to the resident, and called on the landlord to complete all remaining repairs in the permanent address within six weeks and pay £3,780 in compensation.

Richard Blakeway, the Housing Ombudsman, highlighted the “avoidable and unacceptable” nature of the landlord’s neglect of its own decant and repairs policies.

“The heavy-handed approach taken at times only exacerbated the adverse effect on a vulnerable individual and their young children,” he said.

“While I absolutely recognise the challenges facing social landlords because of the housing crisis, these issues relate firmly to the landlord’s management responsibilities and policy commitments to residents.

“This case echoes the systemic issues we found in our recent Spotlight report entitled ‘Relationship of Equals’. Too often residents’ vulnerabilities are missed, or the response is inappropriate. Disrepair in homes, poor communication and dismissive attitudes can exacerbate vulnerabilities.”

The Ombudsman called on all landlords to prepare for the statutory Complaint Handling Code which comes into effect this April.

Yorkshire Housing said it fully accepted the Housing Ombudsman’s findings that its handling of this case fell well below the standards customers rightly expected.

Its Chief Executive will be speaking at length to the family to personally apologise and hear first-hand what changes are needed to prevent cases like this from happening again.

The landlord added that in the two and half years since this case it had completed a thorough, independent review and made several changes “to make sure this doesn’t happen again”. These include:

• working closely with its Customer Complaints and Review Committee to improve how it delivers its services and handles complaints when things go wrong
• providing customers with a single named point of contact to support them if they need to move out of their home whilst it carries out repairs
• reducing its dependency on subcontractors and continuing to increase the amount of work being delivered by its in-house maintenance team
• transforming how it handles complaints, investing in its multi skilled Complaints Team while rolling out additional training to ensure it takes responsibility and always puts the customer first
• bringing its teams closer together to review cases where it gets things wrong to ensure that lessons are learned and that all complaints are “viewed through the customer’s lens”.

Harry Rodd