One of Britain’s biggest social landlords has been ordered to pay tenants more than £140,000 in compensation as a special investigation by the housing ombudsman revealed it was “dismissive” of tenants and found “severe maladministration” including in tackling disrepair and antisocial behaviour.
L&Q, which rents out more than 105,000 homes in England, primarily in London, the south-east and the north-west, “failed to consistently identify damp and mould” as a key problem, disregarded its own antisocial behaviour policy and presided over “a period of significant failure” as a landlord, said Richard Blakeway, the housing ombudsman.
Responses to complaints were marked by “a lack of listening” and were “overtly dismissive, heavy handed and lacking in respect” in some cases, the ombudsman said. There was a “repeated failure to respond fairly to vulnerable residents, especially where the resident had a disability or mental health problems”.
In one incident, staff were said to have reacted to failed repairs by suggesting sending a supervisor instead of a surveyor, because “at least he looks like the surveyor”. According to the ombudsman, in another case staff told a tenant they would only pay compensation if they agreed to a confidentiality clause, and in a third case staff said they needed to take action so not to “appear on ITV News again”.
The broadcaster had exposed L&Q tenants living in cockroach-infested and mouldy homes.
In the first six months of this year, the ombudsman ruled there had been maladministration and service failure in 197 cases raised by residents, with “severe maladministration” more than double the national rate. It ordered the landlord to make 42 apologies to residents for failures and in total made nearly 500 orders and recommendations.
The findings come in the week that new standards for social landlords were proposed, giving 4.2 million households who live in social housing in England and Wales greater powers to hold their landlords to account.
The regulator of social housing wants to strengthen safety requirements, improve complaint handling and require landlords to know more about the condition of their homes.
The efforts by the social housing ombudsman and the regulator of social housing – two separate bodies – follow public outrage at the death of the two-year-old Awaab Ishak after living in a mould-infested social flat in Rochdale.
Blakeway said his special investigation into L&Q found that “resident concerns were repeatedly dismissed or poorly handled, without the respect they or their issues deserved. Crucially, the needs of vulnerable residents were not always identified, and too often this caused serious detriment and risk to them.”
He said: “The landlord consistently failed to take sufficient action on its own monitoring and warning signs that were evident in its complaints and independent reviews – leading to a prolonged period of decline, especially in areas like repairs and complaints handling. Rather than address the core issues, the landlord continued to firefight individual issues.”
Fiona Fletcher-Smith, the group chief executive at L&Q, said: “We recognise that we’ve got things wrong … My senior leadership colleagues and I are personally contacting the residents whose complaints the ombudsman judged to have involved service failure or maladministration on our part. We have apologised for the completely unacceptable service they have received. L&Q has let them down, and I’m truly sorry for that.”
She said the landlord was tackling the issues highlighted, including investing £3bn in a “major works investment programme”.
