Following the Housing Ombudsman’s finding in four cases of severe maladministration by Croydon Council, the authority issued this “learning statement”:
We acknowledge that there were significant failures in the way we handled these cases and would like to offer our apologies to these residents for the difficulties they experienced.
We have embarked upon a transformation journey which seeks to improve the housing services we offer to our residents. The work carried out by the Housing Ombudsman continues to support us in this journey by highlighting areas for improvement.
We complied with the orders of the Ombudsman for each of the cases and we’ll continue to learn from these to improve our service for customers and mitigate the risk of similar failings recurring.
The council says that following these findings, it has:
- Initiated the review of the ASB policy and procedure, with particular focus on the use of the risk assessments, action plans and management oversight.
- Provided training to all staff, specifically around high priority ASB including harassment and hate crime, to ensure that staff are confident in dealing with reports of a similar nature in the future.
- We have implemented Complex Case Forums to bring together teams and complaints officers to address those cases which are multidisciplinary and complex to ensure we provide a consistent and fair approach. These forums are also seeking to address complex service requests to prevent them becoming complaints.
- We expanded our complaints team and are continuously working to improve our systems and procedures to ensure that all complaints are responded to and handled according to our policy and procedure, keeping customers updated at every stage.
“We will continue to work collaboratively with the Ombudsman and value the opportunity to learn from our cases to drive improvements for our residents and we apologise unreservedly for how these cases were handled previously.”
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I as Vice Chair of the Tenant & Leaseholders Panel am not surprised at the outcome of this case. Treatment of many tenants & leaseholders is poor and communication with council residents is atrocious in particular on repairs the standard excuses are rolled out continuously. We have contractors turning up unannounced, delays in getting appointments., even to vulnerable residents why? Left does not know what the right hand is doing.