Our complaints procedure

If you make a complaint, we will:

• Acknowledge your complaint.
• Ask you at the start what outcome you are hoping for.
• Inform you of what action we will take to bring your complaint to a satisfactory conclusion.
• Resolve your complaint quickly and fairly. You will have the chance to discuss this in person with us and can bring a relative, friend or advisor if you wish.
• Phone you once we have resolved your complaint to ask you how satisfied you are with how we handled it. This call is made by an independent organisation who has not previously been involved in the process, so you can speak freely and honestly.

On occasions we may not accept a complaint. If this is the case, we will explain why in writing, and you will have the right to bring the matter to the Housing Ombudsman.

Read our:

• Customer feedback and complaints factsheet
• Customer feedback and complaints policy

How we will respond to you

Feedback / service request

A customer service advisor will log and share your feedback with the relevant service manager as soon as you get in touch.

If we have tried to resolve the issue and you remain unhappy, we will treat this as a stage 1 complaint.

Stage 1 complaints

We will inform you who has taken on your case.

Our aim is to reach a satisfactory conclusion within 10 working days of you first raising the issue.

If new issues are raised during this stage of the investigation, the complaint handler will try to incorporate these (if relevant) into their investigation and subsequent response. However, if the new issue(s) will cause an unreasonable delay to the stage 1 response, it will be logged as a new complaint.

If you remain dissatisfied with the solutions offered at this stage, you have 5 working days in which to tell us you wish to escalate the complaint (stage 2).

Stage 2 complaint escalation

A senior manager will contact you to introduce themselves and have a further 20 working days in which to review and resolve your case.

This review will involve investigating all the previous steps taken to get to this stage and you will receive a written response with full details of the findings.

Unresolved issues

If you do not feel that we have resolved the issue satisfactorily, you may consider taking your complaint at any stage of your enquiry to the independent  Housing Ombudsman Service

What we do with your feedback

We value all feedback and use this to help us improve our services.

• View our latest Customer feedback and performance

The Housing Ombudsman’s Complaint Handling Code

We work closely with the Housing Ombudsman Service, the official body set up by law to look at complaints about housing organisations that are registered with them. Their service is free, independent and impartial for our customers to access.

The Ombudsman’s Complaint Handling Code sets out requirements to allow us and other landlords, to respond to complaints effectively and fairly. The purpose of the Code is to enable landlords to resolve complaints raised by their customers quickly and to use the data and learning from complaints to drive service improvements.

Cottsway fully supports the Code, and we assess our practices against this to ensure we are complying. Find out more about the Code:

• The Housing Ombudsman Service

Changes to the code and our next self-assessment: April 2024

From 1 April 2024, the Code became statutory and placed a legal duty on the Ombudsman to monitor whether housing associations like Cottsway comply with the Code, regardless of whether the Ombudsman receives a complaint from customers about their landlord. 

We are required to carry out a self-assessment against the code every year. Cottsway does this annually, or whenever we introduce major service changes that may affect customer’s satisfaction. We also present our findings to our Board each time.

As part of the Code update, we must now also submit our findings to the Housing Ombudsman each year.

Read our latest:

• Self-assessment (published September 2023)