Concern over low satisfaction levels among Haringey's housing association tenants

Peabody, Clarion and Metropolitan Thames Valley Housing among the landlords with poor ratings from their residents, reports Grace Howarth, Local Democracy Reporter

Satisfaction levels of housing association tenants in Haringey have fallen below 20% when it comes to complaints handling, results have shown.

According to the latest figures only 17.6% of Peabody tenants in Haringey were satisfied with how the housing 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 5th) 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 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 in response that Peabody had invested in more complaint handlers in a bid to improve the figure.

She 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 it [their complaint]”.

Tracy 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.

To contextualise how Peabody gathered its data, Tracy said 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 (MTVH), with only 18.9% of residents in shared ownership homes being satisfied with how it handled complaints, with the number rising to 39.8% for residents in rented homes.

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.

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