NYC Resident Scrutiny Panel – Recommendations from the Complaints Scrutiny October 2025

Ref.

Recommendation

Response from NYC and Actions to be taken

Desired Outcome

Responsible Officer

Completion Date

Notes/Progress or Comments

R1.

Review Complaints policy with a residents focus group taking into account the following: -

Need to use more straight forward language.

Need to take into account HOS requirements following their review of the Policy October 2025.

Include “expected practice re tel calls / personal contact” to ensure its adopted and consistently applied.

The North Yorkshire Council Housing Complaints Policy was reviewed on 16th December 2026, updating the policy following recommendations from the Housing Ombudsman. All of the HO’s recommendations were agreed. Decision - North Yorkshire Housing Complaints Policy | North Yorkshire Council ,

Staff guidance on complaint handling and procedure are to be updated – reflecting a ‘call first’ approach.

 

Our Housing Complaint Policy is compliant with HO expectations.

Our complaint handling guidance to staff is updated and clear.

Our ‘call first’ approach is embedded.

Tenant Satisfaction with complaint handling increases.

Dani Reeves/ Vicky Young

March 2026

Complaints Policy was reviewed and agreed by Exec Member in December 2025. Review considered Tenant Scrutiny feedback and Housing Ombudsman recommendations.

 

Complaints procedure/ guidance to staff re calls and personal contact to be revised.

TSM Q3 – satisfaction with complaint handling is up to 36%.

R2.

Produce an accessible residents easy read guide/visual/flowchart to accompany the policy.

A tenant guide to complaint handling will be produced.

Our complaint handling guidance to tenants and leaseholders is accessible and clear.

 

Alison Clarke

March 2026

 

R3.

Ensure Panel are able to speak with service users with recent  lived experience in future scrutiny projects.

There are issues here around GDPR and sharing of personal data. Instead focus should be on asking tenants with lived experience to self present, rather than details be given.

Panel can carry out evidence based scrutiny reviews based on true experiences of tenants and leaseholders.

Sarah Thompson

Jan-Mar 2026

 

R4.

Consider accessibility and transparency of information for those tenants who can’t/choose not to access information via the NYC website and provide alternatives including the newsletter.

Linked to Communications Plan. To ensure that complaints information is accessible and available – information will be available in the newsletter and in communications to tenants ie. Regulatory Updates.

The Housing Complaints Policy and Procedure is more accessible. Tenants feel more able to raise complaints.

Vicky Young/ Alison Clarke

March 2026

 

R5

Ensure learning from complaints is specific and the learning is shared in a visible space in the newsletters and on the website. Possibly use a “you said, we did” approach.

Collating and reporting on lessons learnt is improving. See Q2 Complaint Handling report and the Annual Service Improvement and Complaint Handling Performance report.

Review Tenant Communications Plan to ensure feedback loop is closed.

Internal communications plan – managers feeding lessons learnt back to teams.

Lessons learnt to be clearly reported and communicated to staff, tenants and leaseholders.

Quarterly Complaints Handling reports.

Newsletter/ comms plan updated.

 

Monthly complaint summaries discussed with teams.

Vicky Young/ Nathan Oxnard/ Alison Clarke

Ongoing – March 2026 review.

Q3 Complaints report will include lessons learnt section.

 

Complaint clinics to be held quarterly with AD and HOS.

R6.

Ensure twice weekly meetings are being held and demonstrating improvements with communication and ownership across teams (as noted in the annual complaints performance report). The Panel would like to hear an update on this discussion and if it has been implemented and for the outcomes to be shared.

Twice weekly meetings between the Complaints Officer and Housing Standards Managers are happening.

This is helping to ensure that complaints are correctly assigned – hope to see this have an impact on the time taken to respond.

Better assignation of complaints should translate into faster response times.

Nathan Oxnard

March 2026

Twice weekly meetings continue to take place to ensure better assignation of complaints.

R7.

For future self-assessments against the Complaint Handling Code to work together with tenants, particularly those who had recent experience of using the complaints service.

Tenant Forum will be invited to review the self-assessment document prior to it being agreed by the Executive

Future self-assessments will include a tenant voice.

Dani Reeves/ Vicky Young

September 2026

 

R8.

NYC need to have a clear plan to improve communication with complainants, meeting individual communication preferences, (tel calls or letters/emails etc) and ensuring that responses are personalised.

New complaints handling system records communication preference. Improvements to the procedure mean that moving forward the complaints officer will have access to housing systems in order to have that increased view of the tenant.

Complaints communication tailored to individual preference and circumstance.

Vicky Young/Nathan Oxnard/ Alison Clarke

March 2026

 

R9.

Complaints performance sits under tenant involvement on the website, link  - Tenant involvement | North Yorkshire Council which isn’t the most obvious place. It is recommended that it’s moved to ensure easier to access for tenants.

This has been reviewed and complaints performance now sits under housing performance and transparency

 

Council housing performance and transparency | North Yorkshire Council

 

Vicky Young/ Alison Clarke

August 2025

Resolved.

R10.

Make the complaints performance information more visibly appealing using charts, graphs and some colour.

We will explore with the web team what the opportunities are to make the information more visibly appealing.

Complaints data more easily digestible.

Alison Clarke

April 2026 (end of year data)

 

R11.

The Panel would like to recommend that NYC learn from best practice found and make outbound calls to all closed complaints to measure satisfaction with complaint handling and outcome.

New complaint handling system will auto-survey complainants upon closure of cases and satisfaction will be recorded.

Further improvement to the staff guidance/ procedure will increase the customer focus and follow up conversations.

Customer satisfaction with complaints handling to be recorded and reported. Management information provided should be used to identify trends in satisfaction with communication etc.

Dani Reeves / Vicky Young

TBC

 

R12.

Review resource within the team to address single point of failure and to demonstrate how the service is valued.

Action has already been taken to secure 1 additional FTE to the complaints team, dedicated to HRA complaints. There is an ongoing corporate review of complaints handling/ resource.

Properly resourced complaints team, dedicated to HRA Services.

Hannah Heinemann

 

March 2026

Recruitment is underway for an additional complaints officer, dedicated to tenant and leaseholder complaints.

R13.

The Panel would want to see the delivery of the recommendations from this scrutiny report shared in the forthcoming months in the newsletters and on the website evidencing that the work of the resident scrutiny panel is taken seriously and valued.

Propose that progress on delivering these recommendations is included in the quarterly complaint handling report and tenant communication plan updated to deliver updates to wider tenant base.

Recommendations are clearly actioned and value of the work is demonstrated.

Vicky Young/ Alison Clarke

 

Ongoing

 

R14.

Ensure Complaint response letters meet the requirements of your own policy and HOS by introducing some quality assurance.

 

The Panel would recommend the Service Improvement team make use of residents to help improve the letters.

Additional resource in the complaints team will provide capacity to quality check response letters.

The Service Improvement Team is not responsible for letters sent.

Additional training – detailed below – should improve the responses given.

Response letters are of a high, consistent quality with checks in place to ensure that standards are being maintained.

HOS/ Nathan Oxnard

 

As above -  recruitment is currently underway to provide some of the capacity needed to do the quality assurance work.

R15.

Clarity on the Member Responsible for Complaints’ (MRC) role (Cllr Myers) and how he works effectively for tenants/NYC.  The governing body response should be from Cllr Myers as he is cited in the self-assessment as the MRC.

Cllr Myers will be briefed on this review and on the progress on delivering the recommendations.

The governing body response was provided by Cllr Myers, this will be made clearer in future self assessments.

MRC is visible and informed, working effectively for tenants.

Andrew Rowe/ Vicky Young

January 2026

Complaints Policy review was considered by Cllr Myers in December 2025

R16.

Ensure that recurring themes from complaints are monitored appropriately and the insight used to identify actions that may need longer term /different action.

Share any outcomes of learning and celebrate success on the website and in the newsletter.

Monthly complaint handling summary to Extended Management Team will continue to raise recurring themes and lessons learnt.

Complaint handling is appropriately monitored and reported with meaningful results.

Vicky Young/Nathan Oxnard

 

 

R17.

Culture of complaints – complaints should be welcomed and all formally recorded rather than “managed”.

Invest in training for every Manager and team that work in Housing services including contact centre.

Ensure specific training for those that investigate and respond to complaints that focuses on active listening, greater compassion and empathy with complainants and try and walk in their shoes and consider how they would feel if it was their mum complaining for example.

Training to be in person in NYC offices in a different workshop style such as role play/use of anonymised case studies would help with attendance and commitment.

Make annual refresher training on complaints mandatory training for Officer that respond to complaints.

Centre for Learning | Housing Ombudsman Service All staff that respond to complaints should also watch this.

Messaging around complaints handling is changing.

Complaint handling e-learning is available and is being identified as mandatory where appropriate.

This will also be rolled out to other services. Ie. Customer.

Lessons learnt workshops also take place, face to face.

Organisational culture and staff competence is improved and a complaint handling ethos embedded.

Dani Reeves/ Vicky Young/ Alison Clarke

 

 

R18.

Develop a script/template to help ensure consistent, high quality, customer focused complaint responses to complaints.

Some template correspondence does exist and this is part of the corporate complaints system project – to be reviewed.

Consistent, high quality complaint responses.

Alison Clarke

 

 

R19.

Further analysis to be carried out on escalations as a result of failing to meet stage 1 promises and action taken to address this failing so that there are no stage 2 escalations for this reason.

This will be carried out once additional resource has been recruited.

 

Nathan Oxnard

 

In January 2026 complaints summary to extended management team we have started to look at numbers of Stage 2s as a result of this.

R20.

NYC to re-introduce tenant inspectors/ mystery shoppers and recruit a pool of volunteers who can follow an annual programme to complement scrutiny work/test recommendations have been delivered.

There is work on-going as part of the Customer programme to introduce mystery shopping of our services. We will explore to understand if tenant could form part of this.

 

Gemma Barnes

 

 

R21.

Consider self-assessing against the 21 recommendations in the Housing Ombudsman’s Knowledge and Information Management report as good practice and identify any gaps that need to be plugged.

This will be undertaken as part of the annual report 2025/26.

Increased assurance of NYC’s complaint handling practice.

 

Vicky Young/ Dani Reeves

 

 

June 2026

 

R22.

Ensure greater visibility of complaints at a senior level by ensuring managers regularly review complaint responses and actions and ensure that promises are kept and lessons are learnt.

We need to establish what level of system access HOS will have to the new complaint handling system. Additionally, quarterly dip checking of complaint responses should help managers to review responses and actions.

Increased visibility of complaints and closure of the complaints process.

 

 

To be part of the new complaints clinic process.

 

Out of complaints scope however the Panel recommend a door knocking exercise to be carried out to engage and develop relationships with tenants, build trust and accountability and take into account vulnerabilities.

 

 

 

Ongoing

To be considered as part of the wider TI plan for the year