By Rob Gershon, HQN Associate 

September 2025 saw the publication of the Housing Ombudsman’s 17th ‘Learning from severe maladministration‘ report. Back in April 2024 the first such report was something of a landmark moment in the broader arena of landlord-tenant relationships and the regulatory powers that operate within it.

It’s enlightening to briefly look back on the summarised conclusions of that first report. There might even be lessons to learn from them. The Housing Ombudsman’s first report said:

“Throughout these cases, there were missed opportunities for landlords. Actions could have been taken at the start of the process. Cases could have been prioritised with due regard to the impact of the situation on the resident. Coordination with third parties could have been more effective. Complaints about staff conduct could have been handled with the gravity that such allegations merit. Communication throughout all of these cases was poor; so poor that for one resident, it led them to believe that he was being discriminated against.”

These common problems have featured regularly throughout the 17 Housing Ombudsman reports. While there’s a great wealth of information designed to inform the entire community of social landlords in the findings of each individual highlighted case, the underlying causes of these failures are often simple and, in some cases, really easy to fix. Again and again, the common themes in cases raised during that first report feature as cautionary tales and informative lessons in how to prevent them.

The ombudsman’s September 2025 report suggests that, in general, lessons about the causes of maladministration are simply not being learned in a broader sense. This piece isn’t about the repeated reappearance of some of the same landlords in severe maladministration cases. Sometimes they are repeatedly featured in these lessons learned reports, other times they simply have later cases than the ones in which they said they’d ‘learn lessons’ where the same failures are still taking place, some time later.

Instead, the intention of the ombudsman’s reports is to provide lessons that all social landlords can learn from, and the conclusions of this latest report suggest the underlying causes haven’t changed at all. Although this report’s findings are focused on individual cases around adaptations, subsidence and rent – issues the ombudsman refers to as “silent” severe maladministration because they “receive less attention” – the underlying causes remain strikingly familiar:

• Excessive delays
• Indecision
• Failing to act on new information or expert opinion
• Disconnects between policies and practices
• Erratic knowledge and information management
• Poor communication and weak coordination of responses
• Quality assurance shortcomings
• Multiple missed opportunities to put things right before we [the ombudsman] intervened.

These failings correlate directly to those highlighted in April 2024, prompting the question of whether landlords are learning the lessons the ombudsman reports highlights to be a bit redundant. Instead, residents must be concerned more about why landlords are not learning these publicly available, highly detailed lessons?

This isn’t to suggest that no progress is being made at all. Another publication from September 2025, the ombudsman’s ‘Annual Complaints Review 2024-2025‘, shows that some individual landlords are improving but the scale of the problem that the majority of tenants and residents face is still too great:

“The ombudsman decided complaints about 419 landlords in 2024-25. Sixteen landlords show significant improvement in the rate and number of upheld complaints compared to last year. However, 120 landlords had 75% or more of the complaints about them upheld.”

The gains that have been made aren’t exactly the kind that can be trumpeted about. The overall upholding of complaints in 2024-2025 is just two percentage points lower than the previous year but are still at a striking 71%.

Perhaps there’s an argument that this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and certainly if you’re a resident who’s been forced to make a complaint about your landlord because of their compounded failures, it’s reassuring to know that you aren’t alone, and that the ombudsman is performing its function in making sure that everybody knows who’s failed and how. But these factors shouldn’t make us even more complacent when the intended outcome of monthly maladministration reports and regular ‘Spotlight’ reports from the ombudsman keep telling us the same things.

So, why aren’t landlords as a homogenous group learning these lessons?

There could be a number of factors in play, but if we’ve learned anything since the 2021 spotlight on damp and mould, it’s that however landlords engage publicly, they often still have ingrained issues of competence and conduct that underpin these repeated failures. Time and time again, in the brief spotlight of individual complaints being redressed, landlords say they’ve changed their policies or introduced staff training or sent out a memo, but further complaints keep arriving as a result of the same failures.

So, we’re back to asking questions about organisation culture. This leads us to wonder whether these issues can ever be resolved through the ombudsman’s findings or resolutions. Instead, it hints at organisational issues that should by now have been identified and worked on – if not resolved – by the Regulator of Social Housing.

In stark contrast to the ombudsman’s focused and proactive work, providing detailed and specific solutions to the issues it repeatedly encounters, the regulator is still operating a little bit behind the curve and in the dark, despite the new remit it was also given back in April 2024. Some of this malaise could be explained by the slower pace of legislation on some issues. Awaab’s Law isn’t due to come into effect until October 2025, and the much-awaited competence and conduct standard, which would surely address the repeated causal failings highlighted by the ombudsman, is very much missing in action.

Although the regulator has started to find some organisations failing its consumer standards – C3 and C4 gradings marking landlords where issues are the most acute – no fines have been implemented and, crucially, the performance improvement plans aren’t available publicly and there’s no realistic determination about what’s gone wrong and how it’s going to be fixed at an organisational level.

Residents now have a much clearer view of what’s going wrong at organisations who still inexplicably can’t seem to address the root causes of their service and maladministration failures. Why the lessons haven’t been learned is a question they cannot answer and is a question that should be levelled at sector bodies and the regulator.