Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:

To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, if he will ask the Housing Ombudsman Service to publish data on the number of complaints that have been (a) made and (b) upheld against (i) Clarion Housing Group and its subsidiaries and (ii) Genesis Housing in each of the last four years.

The attached tables set out the complaints made and upheld against Clarion Housing Group and Genesis Housing in each of the relevant years. As Clarion was formed in 2016-17 following the merger of a number of housing associations, figures relating to their complaints are therefore broken down by individual landlord and for the group as a whole.

One of the Housing Ombudsman’s strategic objectives is to support landlords and residents to resolve more complaints locally through early resolution. In 2017-18, 79 per cent of the complaints they dealt with were closed at this stage. In 2017-18, 7,087 cases were closed by the Housing Ombudsman, and of those, 5,467 were closed through local resolution while the complaint was going through the landlord’s complaints procedure. These cases did not need to go on to be formally determined by the Housing Ombudsman.