Complaints, compliments and comments about Housing and customer consultation

We aim to give a high standard of service to everyone and we care about getting things right.

Your views are important and they help us to check that we are giving the best possible service. We want to know if we have made a mistake so that we can put things right. We also want to know when we do things well.

Complaints

If you have had any problems when using the service please tell us what is wrong as this is the first step in helping to put matters right. For more information about how to make a complaint, please see our complaints procedure.

Information about the lessons we have learned from complaints and the number of complaints received by Housing Operations in 2009/10

We welcome complaints and compliments about our service as they help us to learn from our mistakes. When we receive a complaint, whether it is formal or informal we consider what lessons can be learned and we take action to improve our service.

In 2009/10 we received 14 formal complaints about our service, two of the complainants were not satisfied with our initial response and contacted our head of service under stage two of the complaints procedure. None of the customers took further action under stage three of the procedure and complained to the Chief Executive. None of the complaints that we received in this period were referred to the Ombudsman service.

Some examples of the lessons we have learned from complaints are as follows

• A customer said that the paperwork for Coldbuster grants was not clear so we arranged for changes to be made
• A customer complained about one of our information booklets, we agreed that the information was not clear and we re-wrote our “Applying for Housing” booklet.
• A customer told us that we did not provide enough information for residents undertaking adaptation works with grant aid. We wrote a new information leaflet and asked the customer for his comments on the new leaflet.
• An entire service was reviewed and changed when we received complaints from customers that were investigated further.

Compliments, comments and suggestions

We welcome your compliments, comments and suggestions, as these will help us to know what we are doing well and also how we can improve our service.

Make a comment, suggestion or compliment about a service or staff member

Alternatively you can contact us in writing, by email or in person from our Housing contacts page.

Customer consultation

We regularly ask our customers what they think about our services. This consultation is carried out in different ways from surveys to focus groups. Most of our customers say that they are happy with the services that we provide but when they tell us that they were dissatisfied, we get in touch to find out more about the problem or to explain our actions. Further information is available in our consultation strategy(pdf, 58KB).