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In April 2024 the Housing Ombudsman (HOS) released a complaints code that sets out the approach a housing association must take to complaint handling.

Find out how we’re fully aligned with the code below: 

• There should be no more than two stages to the complaint handling process.  

At stage 1 we acknowledge your complaint in 5 working days. We’ll investigate within the following 10 working days. If you’re dissatisfied with the investigation, you can ask us to escalate the complaint to stage 2. You’ll receive a reply within 20 working days from the stage 2 acknowledgement. This is our final response. 

• The Ombudsman can support customers by investigating how a service has been delivered and how the complaint was dealt with. 

The Ombudsman will respond to customers by investigating and writing to them with their determination. We’re currently seeing response times between 6 and 12 months from the HOS. To ensure transparency, we provide customers with Housing Ombudsman details as part of our complaint responses. 

• The Ombudsman expect landlords to have an overview of on-going actions that are agreed as part of a complaint response. 

If there’s actions agreed as part of a complaint response, we’ll put together a Plan of Action and share it with our customer. We’ll assign a colleague to lead on delivering the plan of action through to resolution and act as customer contact. 

We use the feedback from your complaint and findings from our investigations to identify service improvement learnings. These are shared with the service leads manager for improvements to be actioned. 

We consider complaints as a positive, as it helps us to deliver a great service and be a better landlord. If you’ve any comments, questions or feedback on Golding’s approach to complaint handling we’d like to hear from you. Please email us at complaints@goldinghomes.org.uk