The Housing Ombudsman’s annual complaints review for 2021-22 shows that property condition remains the biggest area of complaint about social landlords – and more action is needed by social housing landlords to improve the quality of homes and service.

Landlords handling of complaints also needs significant improvement with 66% of the complaints about complaint handling investigated by the Ombudsman upheld.

The Ombudsman has written to 32 landlords where it found maladministration in at least 50% of its decisions, and for five of those landlords it was more than 75%. This compares to an overall rate of 48% where the Ombudsman upheld at least one part of the complaints in its cases.

The review covers April 2021 to March 2022 and draws insight from 115 annual landlord performance reports where the Ombudsman investigated five or more complaints, together with results from annual surveys of landlords and residents.

In 59% of property condition complaints the Ombudsman found there had been service area failures by the landlord, 20% of which were resolved through the landlords’ own complaints procedure. However, the Ombudsman upheld 39% of all property condition complaints.

There were failures in 86% of complaint handling complaints, 20% of which were put right during the landlord’s own procedure, and 66% upheld following the Ombudsman’s investigation.

Resident feedback through the annual survey shows there has been a 17% decline in the number of residents who think making a complaint would make a difference compared to the previous year. Only 36% of residents agreed that their landlord shares learning from complaints, compared to the feedback from landlords where 60% agreed that they share learning with residents.

On the accessibility of complaints procedures, residents who considered that the ease of access to their landlord’s complaint process was acceptable or better, dropped from 68% to 51%.