Less than one in five of one housing association's tenants in Haringey are happy with the service they get when they make a complaint, figures show,

According to survey results, only 17.6% of Peabody tenants in the borough were satisfied with how the association handled complaints in 2023/24.

For overall satisfaction, only 49% of tenants said they were satisfied with how it acted as a landlord.  

By comparison, one third of Hornsey Housing Trust tenants were satisfied with how the trust handled complaints, and 66% of tenants said they were satisfied overall with the trust. 

At a housing, planning, and development scrutiny panel last night (Wednesday November 5), representatives from a number of housing associations that operate in the borough met to discuss the “really bad” resident satisfaction with Haringey Council. 

Addressing Peabody’s results, committee member Cllr John Bevan, said: “They look really bad. Your tenant overall satisfaction rate is 49% and complaints handling is 17.6%. Is there something wrong? They just seem really low.”

Tracy Packer, Peabody’s managing director for north-east London, said: “We do know we need to improve the way we handle complaints and we’ve invested in more complaint handlers in our team.”

The director added that getting complaints “on the right track from the beginning” was a focus for the housing association along with how they contacted residents to “understand more about their complaint]”.

Ms Packer said: “As you can see from that feedback there’s some improvement to be had with the way we do that, definitely.”

Out of the five housing associations present, Peabody was one of the lowest performing when it came to overall tenant satisfaction and complaints handling. 

Ms Packer explained the number reflected both feedback on the process and the outcome of a complaint, which she said may have influenced numbers “to be as low as they are”. 

She said: “When a resident has had a community safety case or a complaint case we do a survey to see how satisfied they are with what happened. 

“Some of that feedback we get is to do with the process itself, some is about the complaint outcome and whether the residents are happy with the outcome.

“Sometimes that’s quite hard to separate and I think that does influence those numbers to be as low as they are.”

Also scoring badly was Metropolitan Thames Valley, with only 39.8% residents in rented homes and 18.9% of residents in shared ownership homes satisfied with how it handled complaints.

For Clarion, only 15.9% of its shared ownership residents were satisfied with the association’s complaints handling and 20.3% of its residents in social housing.