The outgoing Housing Ombudsman has identified some priorities for the sector

Writing in Social Housing, Richard Blakeway called on RPs to address issues in the following areas:

• Honest, inspiring leadership is needed to overcome the stigma experienced by social housing tenants
• The learning from complaints about housing management issues should be taken into account when designing future homes
• Communication, individual circumstances, and temporary moves should be considered when putting together cyclical repairs programmes to meet the 2035 Decent Homes target
• Following mergers, complaints should be used to test whether  integration programmes are delivering the expected outcomes
• As the social housing demographic gets older, RPs should plan for an increase in tenant needs around factors such as dementia and hearing loss
• Complaints should be mined for insights about data integrity, especially before embarking on digital transformation
• Use complaints as tools for learning, while digging deeper in areas where there is a lack of complaints.