Go to navigation
Housing complaints
Medway Council’s Housing
Services values customers’ compliments, comments and complaints as
they provide feedback on our performance that helps us to improve
our services.
Medway Council Housing
Services incorporates a wide range of services including:
Compliments and comments
Housing Services is committed
to providing an excellent service, putting our customers at the
heart of everything we do. We hope there will be times when you
would like to tell us that you are happy with a service that we
have provided, or the work that has been done by a particular
member of staff or team. Alternatively you may have a comment or
suggestion about the way we run our services.
If you would like to
compliment or comment on our services you can complete and return
the form at the back of this leaflet or you can contact our quality
monitoring and review officer.
Complaints
A complaint is an expression
of dissatisfaction about the standard of service that you have
received. Medway Council’s Housing Services hopes that the service
you receive is always of a quality you would expect. However, there
may be times when you feel unhappy with the service that has been
provided and you wish to make a complaint. Housing Services values
complaints as they help to highlight areas where we need to improve
our services.
When dealing with complaints
we will:
- listen to you;
- investigate all complaints
thoroughly;
- acknowledge and learn from our
mistakes;
- apologise where mistakes have been made
and do what we can to put things right quickly;
- send you a satisfaction survey once your
complaint has been dealt with to monitor your satisfaction
level.
How to make a complaint:
We operate a simple two-stage
complaints procedure.
Stage one
To make a complaint contact
the housing quality monitoring and review officer by phone, email
or in writing. The officer will log your complaint and where
appropriate you will receive written acknowledgement within three
working days of Housing Services receiving the complaint.
Your complaint will then be
fully investigated by the appropriate housing officer. You will
receive a full written response to your complaint within 10 working
days of receiving the complaint. If we are unable to resolve the
complaint within this timescale, you will receive a letter of
explanation and be given a new deadline.
How to take the complaint
further
We hope that we can resolve
your complaint at stage one. However if you are unhappy with the
outcome of our investigation you can take the matter further by
asking for your complaint to be reviewed at a stage two Level. This
will involve the complaint being investigated by the chief
executive complaints officer.
Stage two
In order to take your
complaint to stage two contact the chief executive complaints
officer by phone, email or in writing. The officer will fully
investigate the complaint and write to you with their outcome
within 10 working days of receiving the complaint.
At any stage you can talk to
one of your elected councillors. Alternatively, a third party, such
as an MP or community organisation, can make a complaint on your
behalf.
Medway Council Housing
Services hopes that its complaints procedure will deal quickly and
successfully with any complaint that you may have with the service.
However, if you are still not entirely satisfied you can make a
complaint to the Local Government Ombudsmen which deals with
complaints about councils and other authorities.
Housing Services also provides
a compensation leaflet that can be obtained in council contact
points.
How Housing Services monitors
complaints
The Head of Service
Improvement will have overall responsibility for ensuring that the
complaints procedure is adhered to and that complaints are
monitored.
The Housing Management Team
will receive regular performance monitoring reports on complaints
that have been received by all service areas. Customer feedback
surveys will be used to monitor overall customer satisfaction
levels.
The performance reports will
include the following, as a minimum:
- the number of stage one
and stage two complaints received by Housing Services overall and
by each housing service area;
- the percentage of stage one and stage two
complaints responded to on time by Housing Services overall and by
each Housing Service area;
- the number of Ombudsman complaints
received;
- the number of customer satisfaction
surveys returned each month and the percentage that
were either satisfied or dissatisfied with
the service;
- areas of learning following the complaint
to ensure areas for improvements and adjustments in relation to
staff training, policy or procedural reviews are
implemented.
This information will be published in
other forms to customers such as resident groups.
Landlord services complaints
The Tenant Services Authority requires
us to provide specific information on the complaints that we have
had in the previous financial year.
Last year (April 2009 – March 2010) we
had 65 stage 1 complaints about the Landlord Service. Of these, we
identified that 44 were justified.
We also paid compensation
to eight customers as a result of something we did or did not
do.
All our staff, following investigation
of a complaint, are required to note any learning.
Examples of what we have learnt
from complaints in 2009/10
- Following reviewing complaints about our
repairs service, we are currently developing an appointment system
so customers can be told when to expect our main repairs
contractor.
- We have reviewed the specification for UPVC
windows and this has been enhanced following complaints about the
quality of these.
- We have also reviewed our customer care and
service protocols, and now have in place a series of service
standards to which staff are fully aware to improve our response
times to your calls.
- We have launched a new IT software package
called Contact Point which is being used to record all customer
enquiries made when customers report repairs and visit us
at Riverside
One.
For further details of the complaints
we received for landlord services and the service area they were
about please select the following Landlord
services complaints breakdown April 2009 – March 2010 (pdf
31KB). To use this file you will need Adobe Acrobat Reader. If you
do not have it on your computer, please use our advice page
Go to the Housing Services:
Compliments, comments and complaints leaflet on our
housing leaflets page.
Add this page to my Quick Links:
Add page
Send this page to a friend:
Send