Make Things Right: social housing residents helped to raise complaints and improve living conditions

Social housing residents will be helped with improving their living conditions through a new government campaign.

‘Make Things Right’ will help residents raise complaints if they are unhappy with their landlord and struggling to get problems resolved, with clear advice on how to progress issues to the Housing Ombudsman if necessary.

The launch of the new campaign is part of the social housing white paper – ‘The Charter for Social Housing Residents’ - which sets out a comprehensive action plan to make landlords more accountable for the services they deliver.

The Charter aims to speed up the complaints procedure for social housing residents, by reducing decision times and ensuring effective resolution and improving access to the Housing Ombudsman.

Councillor James Jamieson, Local Government Association Chairman, said: “Councils want all residents, regardless of tenure, to have the security of a safe and well-maintained home which they are proud to live in.

“It is really important that the voice of all social housing residents is heard, and councils are supportive of measures which improve standards and empower residents.

“This will give them confidence in ensuring that action can be taken to improve living conditions, where it is required.”

The Charter will make landlords more accountable for the services they deliver, including access to a new information scheme for residents of housing associations and introducing a set of resident satisfaction measures that landlords will have to report against. 

It has been created to ensure all social housing residents are treated with respect and dignity and sets out what every resident should expect from their landlord:

• To be safe in your home.
• To know how your landlord is performing.
• To have your complaints dealt with promptly and fairly.
• To be treated with respect.
• To have your voice heard by your landlord.
• To have a good quality home and neighbourhood to live in.
• To be supported to take your first step to ownership.

Responding to the new campaign, a spokesperson for local housing provider, Rochdale Boroughwide Housing (RBH) said: “We aim to provide a great service to all our tenants and customers, but when things do go wrong, we are committed to making it as simple as possible to make a complaint and get it resolved.

“Our complaints panel of RBH tenants also provides our customers with somewhere to take their complaint if they are not happy with how it has been dealt with, and we work with the tenants on our panel to make sure that we learn from the complaints we receive."

Kate, RBH resident in Middleton and member of the RBH Complaints Panel, said: "After going through the complaints process with RBH and receiving a very good experience, I was keen to understand other people's experiences of the process.

“By being a member of the complaints panel, I feel I can feed back on how other complaints have been dealt with and ensure improvements are made along the way where appropriate - not just to the complaint process but to the varied reasons for tenants complaining, ensuring a better experience for all."

Advice for residents can be found via the campaign website, here.