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

To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, pursuant to the Answer of 28 March 2019 to Question 234648 on the finding that the average time taken in 2018-19 to determine cases entering the Housing Ombudsman Service’s formal remit is expected to be less than seven months as of the end of March 2019, for what reason the Housing Ombudsman Service is advising people referring complaints to it that there is an eight to ten months wait for a determination on those complaints to be made.

The Housing Ombudsman Service started the year with an average case determination time of 8 months and has used this as an indicator to customers throughout the year. On 4 April 2019, The Housing Ombudsman advised all staff of performance for 2018-19 and advised an update to their advice to customers, that determinations will take between 6 and 8 months. The Ombudsman's advice is that the expected timescales - using a range as the average - will not be experienced by all customers.This will vary dependent on the level of complexity of cases entering the Housing Ombudsman Service’s formal remit.