Response to Housing Ombudsman investigation report

The Housing Ombudsman has today (Thursday) published the findings of its investigation into Hackney Council’s housing service.

The report highlights the significant challenges Hackney Council has faced and continues to tackle, including recovering from the Covid-19 pandemic, the urgent need for social housing, and managing an ageing housing stock within constrained resources. It also recognises the specific challenge the Council has faced following the criminal cyber attack in 2020.

The Ombudsman acknowledges the dedicated commitment of housing officers in supporting tenants, and that progress has been made in the council’s plans to improve its housing services, such as the speeding up of response to reports of damp and mould, and the efforts taken to better support people with additional needs living in Hackney Council homes.

Cllr Guy Nicholson, Deputy Mayor and Cabinet member for Housing Management and Regeneration, said:

“The Council has never shied away from its duty to its tenants and residents to provide the best housing services and should it fall short, it must improve.

“The Council acknowledges the Housing Ombudsman’s assessment that tenants have not received the service they should be receiving from the Council. On behalf of the Council I apologise for this shortfall and reassure both tenants and the Housing Ombudsman that Hackney Council is fully committed to improving the service it provides as a landlord to the homes it has responsibility for. 

“The Housing Ombudsman has investigated a range of cases that had affected tenants from two years ago which predated the implementation of the Council’s own internally led service improvement plan. 

“It is heartening to note that the Housing Ombudsman recognises the commitment of housing officers in delivering services to tenants, acknowledges the Council’s work to implement its service improvement plan and the introduction of a better approach to support residents with additional needs to live in their homes.

“The Housing Ombudsman also acknowledged the range of external challenges that the Council has faced in recent times which included the Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns, rising prices and the impact of maintaining an ageing housing stock which had all contributed to the shortfall in service.

“I can assure the Housing Ombudsman that all in the Council will remain focussed on improving the housing services it provides to its tenants.”

Over the next three months the Council will develop an action plan for how it will meet the recommendations in the report and this will be provided to the Housing Ombudsman.

Additional information

Over the last two years since the Council started its housing improvement journey it has made strides forward to improve its service to tenants. 

As well as further building on these actions, the Council will be: 

• introducing a document management system for housing services staff to better track correspondence with residents and the allocation of work between officers, speeding up responses to service requests and complaints - from July 2025. 
• continuing to review our response to complaints handling to ensure positive outcomes for residents, and that we are learning from our mistakes to address recurring issues - by July 2025
• driving down our backlog of responsive repairs, ensuring all jobs are completed within target dates and taking prompt action on our more complex cases - by September 2025
• establishing an advisory group bringing together external professionals, councillors and officers to act as a critical friend and to bring collective challenge to the service to help oversee culture change and service improvement - by end of October 2025 
• undertaking a wholesale reorganisation of the service to ensure it is fit for purpose and structured appropriately to enable accountability at every level to support the successful transition to a performance-led and resident-led culture - by December 2025 
• reviewing the policies and procedures around fixing leaks, treating damp and mould, and temporarily rehousing residents during repairs work to ensure that they are fair, intuitive and transparent - by December 2025
• investing in its staff by increasing training capacity, ensuring staff have a full understanding of their responsibilities under “Awaab’s Law” and being clear on the  behaviours expected of them - by December 2025
• implementing a new integrated housing management system to ensure that staff have the systems and tools to deliver excellent services to residents - phase 1 January 2026

Steps the Council has already taken since starting its housing repairs improvement journey include: 

improving the way it manages damp and mould cases by:

• speeding up inspections of reports of damp and mould to inspect within a target of five working days;
• prioritising cases based on the severity of mould and any health conditions that tenants or members of their households may have; 
• in cases of severe damp and mould, removing mould straight away to take away any immediate risk until the full remedial work is carried out; 
• bringing in contractors, including ventilation specialists, to increase its ability to respond effectively to damp and mould cases;
• installing monitors to measure the temperature and humidity in a home to continuously assess the risk of damp and mould. 
• prioritising attending and fixing leaks by the end of the next day, where possible. 
• speeding up its response to complaints - with repairs complaints responded to on average within 12 days and 78% within the target of 10 days.
• improving its handling of complaints. Over 30% of repairs related complaints are now being resolved on the first day of receipt. This is a significant improvement in our handling of repairs-related complaints, with tenant satisfaction recorded in our complaints surveys increasing from 32% in 2023/2024 to 51% in 2024/2025. 

The Council will continue to analyse issues raised in the complaints it receives:

• where follow-on works were required, these would frequently require chasing by residents;
• where surveyor inspections were required works identified were not always delivered quickly; 
• repairs complaints being dealt with outside of our Building Maintenance team were delaying them from being resolved.

As a result, the council has made changes, including:

• performance monitoring at each stage of the surveyor process which is reviewed at monthly scrutiny meetings;
• introducing a dedicated complaints handling team in Building Maintenance to ensure a more resident-focused approach to complaints handling;
• providing details of Area Surveying Managers or Project Leads to residents to enable them to contact them while any repair issue is being resolved;
• ensuring better coordination across the Building Maintenance team to resolve complaints and work with external contractors;
• appointing four additional contractors, increasing capacity and enabling us the faster completion of repair works. We have also introduced a more robust approach to contract management. 

These changes have seen a reduction in the proportion of complaints residents felt necessary to escalate to the Ombudsman from around 16% in the nine months before their investigation to around 9.2% in the nine months following it.

Since the introduction of the Council’s Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) scheme, 334 tenants have signed up to this process in place of pursuing a legal disrepair claim, and 309 full and final settlements have been made. This has drastically reduced the process as ADRs take on average three months per case, compared to over a year for a legal disrepair case. Residents are also guaranteed to receive 100% of any compensation offered. The ADR approach is not contrary to the complaints process, tenants can still use the Council’s complaints process alongside the ADR process. 

We know that it takes a long time to build up confidence in the service which is then reflected in improved satisfaction levels. While the overall 2024/25 tenant satisfaction levels, measured by the annual satisfaction survey, are slightly lower at 57% than the 59% in 2023/24, it is close to the median benchmark of our peers, which is 59%. The improvement work the service is doing is still seeing higher satisfaction levels in virtually every single area compared to two years ago when the service started its improvement journey. 

We also measure overall repairs satisfaction separately on an annual and monthly basis where all tenants who have had repairs carried out in the previous month are asked to complete a short questionnaire. Annual overall satisfaction with the repairs service for 2023/24 remained at 63%, which is consistent with our peer group benchmark group where the median satisfaction figure is also 63%. 

For our monthly transactional surveys we recognise that the response rates to these surveys are low (approximately 200/300 per month), however since the introduction of the service’s improvement plan there has been a consistent increase in repairs satisfaction which shows the impact of the improvement journey the Council is on, as seen from the figures below. 

• December 2022 - 58.7%
• December 2023 - 67.5%
• December 2024 - 77.3%

Hackney Council recently completed procurement of a new Housing Management System to complete the Housing Service’s recovery from the 2020 criminal cyber-attack. Work has started on configuration of the system with the first phase planned to go live in January 2026. This will enable a more robust approach to the management of our housing service and the data that helps support the services.

Despite decades of underfunding for council housing, alongside the actions outlined above, the Council will be investing £48m between 1 April 2025 and 31 March 2026 to improve and maintain our housing stock. Last year the Council joined calls from 100 local authority social landlords to save council housing and plug the £2.2bn black hole that collective council housing budgets are expected to reach by 2028.

This report (published on 15 May 2025) produced by London Councils, the Society of London Treasurers and the London Housing Directors’ Group warns that without national policy changes needed to secure a better future for London social housing, London Boroughs will need to reduce their spending by £264m in real terms over the next three years to avoid exhausting the housing budgets.