Trends and challenges - Council housing complaint report 2025 to 2026
National trends
There is a continued increase in complaint numbers within the housing sector, with the Housing Ombudsman’s annual report for 2024/25 recording that they completed their highest number of formal investigations ever, issuing more than 7,000 determinations, and making 26,000 interventions. For that year, they received 44,508 complaints and enquiries. As you can see from this report, that workload means registered providers are often receiving determinations where the substantive issues occurred several years before and service improvements have already been made. Regardless, the determinations we receive from the Housing Ombudsman remain vital to our understanding of their expectations and their assessments of our work are immensely valuable.
Complaints related to repairs and maintenance continue to be the most prevalent across the sector. This is understandable when it’s the service most used by residents, and this is unlikely to change. The Housing Ombudsman has reported that 43% of the cases that they decided on in 2024/25 were about property condition.
Complaints about damp and mould remain a concern throughout the sector, with awareness, levels of concern, and expectations higher since the introduction of what is known as ‘Awaab’s Law’. As this is expanded to include other hazards, we may well see greater awareness of these issues as well, and therefore more complaints relating to health and safety concerns.
Our 2025/26 Tenant Satisfaction Survey showed that of those who said they had made a complaint, only 31.5% were satisfied with the handling of it. This represents no significant change from the previous year, when satisfaction was 31.3%. and is still far below the peak in 2022/23 when it was 66%. However, those responding that they were dissatisfied or very dissatisfied with the complaint handled reduced from 59% in 2024/25 to 54% this year, with an increase in neutral responses. Based on the data submitted to the Regulator last year by all social landlords, we are in the third quartile for satisfaction with complaint handling when compared to other landlords.
Whilst we cannot always offer the outcome a complainant is looking for, we would always want them to feel that their complaint had been taken seriously, that they had been treated with empathy, and that they received a clear, thorough and timely response. We plan on implementing measures to ensure we get feedback from residents following a complaint so we can understand why people are dissatisfied and make timely interventions. We also now have our Resident Complaint Panel who will also be involved in examining what we can be doing to improve satisfaction with the complaints process.
There may also be other reasons for the low level of satisfaction with complaint handling shown in the survey. We need to ensure we are recognising complaints and logging them as such, to avoid situations where a resident may think they have made a complaint, but we do not have a record of it, as may have happened in some of these cases.
It may also be that there is often confusion around what is and is not a complaint, so a respondent may actually have been unhappy following a report of anti-social behaviour, for example. They might term this as a complaint, but it would not meet our criteria to be handled within our complaints process. We will be examining the data from the survey, and where the information is available, we will be comparing it against our complaints records to ascertain if a respondent did have a complaint within the last 12 months, whether it was regarding our services as a landlord (as this may also be an area of confusion), if it was responded to within timescale, and what we can learn from those cases to improve our complaint handling.
Our key themes
We have observed the following trends and challenges regarding the complaints received in 2025/26:
Damp & Mould
Complaints about the handling of damp and mould reports have reduced slightly, with 42 of the 265 Stage 1 complaints handled by the Council including damp and mould as a main issue. This equates to 15.8%, compared to 21.7% in 2024/25. At Stage 2, 18 of the 80 cases included damp and mould as a main issue, which is 22.2% of all Stage 2 cases handled by the Council, down from 34.2% last year.
Repairs
ODS have reported that of the complaints they received in 2025/26, gas (19%) and plumbing (14.7%) were the categories that featured the most, with carpentry (9.2%) and roofing (8.7%) in third and fourth place.
Communication
Communication was noted as a factor in 165 of the 265 Stage 1 complaints handled by the Council, up from 120 instances out of 226 cases last year. It was also mentioned in 48 of the 80 Stage 2 complaints handled by the Council. This is clearly an area for focus.
Communication was frequently one of the factors in complaints involving the Tenancy Management team, being mentioned in 96 complaints they were involved with. This is thought to be largely due to continued staffing issues. The Landlord Services team underwent a restructure towards the end of 2025, including moving to ‘area working’ (with multiple staff members covering a broader area, rather than one Housing Officer to a patch), and adjustments to roles and responsibilities, which will address this.
Requests to move
The Customer Care & Complaints team have noticed an increase in complaints where one of the outcomes being sought is a permanent move to a different property. Across Stage 1 and 2, over 12% of complaints handled by the Council included a request to move. These are the cases where it was explicitly requested as part of the outcome to a complaint, but it may also be a factor in others where the resident is hoping it will be offered but does not specifically ask, or where the resident wants to use the complaint findings to assist in furthering an existing transfer request. Usually this is linked to the issues in the complaint (for example, where there is an ongoing damp and mould issue, or there is a complaint about our handling of anti-social behaviour), but on occasion it is requested as a form of compensation. In most of these cases, the resident has already put in an application to be rehoused, and in many instances has some type of priority need that has been recognised. However, due to the shortage of housing within Oxford, many of these residents face a considerable wait. Unfortunately, an alternative property is not something that the Customer Care & Complaints team can offer as a remedy, and whilst we can check that the appropriate procedures have been followed and refer people for support where necessary, we cannot circumvent the policies in place around the allocation of housing. This often results in us not being able to provide the resident with the outcome they were looking for and is likely to contribute to low satisfaction with the complaints process.
New Build Properties
In 2024/25 we received 14 complaints regarding new build properties. In 2025/26, we did not handle any complaints in conjunction with OX Place. Complaints around new builds tend to occur around the end of defect period so a fluctuation in these types of complaints is to be expected, depending on where we are in the development cycle.
Complaint Handling
As the figures show, there have been considerable issues within both the Council and ODS regarding responding to complaints within timescale. In order to be considered compliant, the complaint must be acknowledged within 5 working days, and responded to within 10 working days at Stage 1 or 20 working days at Stage 2 (unless a permitted extension is applied). Both of these targets must be met in order for a complaint to be considered responded to within timescale.
In many of the cases handled within the Council, a complaint was responded to within the timeframe given after acknowledgement, but was acknowledged late. For example, 61 of the 63 Stage 1 complaints acknowledged late by the Council were responded to within the usual timescales from that point i.e. responded to within 10 working days of acknowledgement or with an extension. At Stage 2, this was 37 out of 53 cases responded to within 20 working days of the late acknowledgement or within the extension timeframe. In fewer cases, it was acknowledged within timescale and responded to out of target (8 Stage 1 complaints handled by the Council, none at Stage 2). There are also cases where both the acknowledgement and response were late (3 Stage 1 complaints and 16 Stage 2 complaints handled by the Council).
Where complaints have not been received directly by the Housing Customer Care & Complaints team or ODS, we have preserved the original date that the complaint was received into the organisation, resulting in some cases not being received by a hub until after the initial deadline for acknowledgement has passed. We are working with colleagues to ensure everyone knows how to recognise a complaint and where to direct it to.
We have implemented a new Housing Complaints Policy which was reviewed by our Resident Policy Review Group and was approved by Cabinet and Full Council in July 2026. The Housing Ombudsman confirmed the policy is compliant with the Code in July 2026. The annual self-assessment has been updated to confirm compliance with the Code. This policy reinforces our commitment to handling complaints in compliance with the Code, and alongside that we are working on a new procedure to ensure our complaint handling is efficient and to mitigate the risks that have previously created delays. We have also improved our monitoring and reporting systems within both the Housing Customer Care & Complaints team and with ODS, as well as enhancing the oversight we have with ODS’ complaints handling.
The 6% drop in overall Stage 1 complaints is small and may mean that fewer residents felt they had cause to complain, however we will monitor this to ensure that we are continuing to recognise and record complaints whenever appropriate. We will consider this in line with the resident perception survey regarding satisfaction with the services we provide to ensure that the complaints service is sufficiently publicised and accessible.
The 74.5% increase in Stage 2 cases may be attributed to a number of factors. In some instances, a resident has mentioned early in the complaints process that their intention is to have their complaint investigated by the Housing Ombudsman, and in order to do this, the complaint needs to go through both stages of our internal process. There is also an increased awareness of the right to escalate to Stage 2, both among residents and staff. When the increase in Stage 2 escalations was first identified, we carried out a review to check the reasons for the escalations (residents are not obliged to provide one) and the Stage 1 investigations. We also cleared the Stage 1 backlog, resulting in a larger number of Stage 1 outcomes being issued at the same time, thus increasing Stage 2 escalations.
The reasons for the escalations were varied and we did not find any inherent issues with the Stage 1 investigations, but we acknowledge that the delays some residents experienced in getting responses at some points over the last couple of years likely contributed to overall dissatisfaction. We did note that frequent reasons for Stage 2 escalation included failure to complete the actions agreed at Stage 1, and dissatisfaction with the resolution offered (e.g. level of compensation, unable to offer a move). We have introduced an improved system for monitoring the actions agreed as part of the resolution to a complaint, and whilst we are finding that the Housing Ombudsman are frequently finding our compensation offers to be appropriate, the introduction of our Compensation Policy in 2026 will help clarify things for residents and manage their expectations.
