Housing Disrepair Index

What is in the set

21 decisions from 16 landlords, holding 57 separately determined issues, 73 monetary awards, 53 orders and 16 recommendations. Every one links to the decision it came from.

• Condition of the home — 33 of 57
• Complaint handling — 19 of 57
• Other subjects — 5 of 57

Findings on the condition of the home

The Ombudsman decides each issue in a case separately, so these are counted per issue rather than per decision. Findings about complaint handling are counted apart from them, below — a landlord can be cleared on the disrepair and criticised on how it handled the complaint, and the two must not be run together.

• Maladministration — 14 of 33
• No maladministration — 7 of 33
• Severe maladministration — 6 of 33
• Reasonable redress — 3 of 33
• Service failure — 3 of 33

Findings on complaint handling

• Maladministration — 7 of 19
• No maladministration — 4 of 19
• Reasonable redress — 4 of 19
• Service failure — 3 of 19
• Severe maladministration — 1 of 19

What the disrepair concerned

An issue can involve more than one defect, so these counts overlap.

• Damp and mould — 10 of 33
• Leaks and water ingress — 7 of 33
• Heating and hot water — 5 of 33
• Other — 5 of 33
• Structural — 3 of 33
• Windows and doors — 2 of 33
• Pests and vermin — 1 of 33
• Plaster and ceilings — 1 of 33
• Plumbing and drainage — 1 of 33

Money

19 of 21 decisions state a monetary award, across 73 separate awards. No total is given, and none should be calculated from this data. The awards mix sums the Ombudsman ordered, sums a landlord had already offered, components of a larger total, reimbursements of the resident’s own costs, and at least one open-ended award of a percentage of rent. Adding them would produce a figure nobody awarded. Each award in the CSV records who awarded it, whether it was ordered or merely offered, and whether it is a total or one part of one.

Where a decision contradicts itself

Limitations

• Selection is not random. Decisions were chosen because they concerned particular defects, so the mix of defects here reflects that choice and nothing more.
• Small numbers. With 21 decisions no percentage would be meaningful, so none is given anywhere on this page or in the data.
• Awards are not comparable and are never totalled. Decisions state redress in different ways, and the data records which kind each figure is precisely so that they are not added together.
• Social landlords only. The Ombudsman investigates its member landlords, so this says nothing about private landlords.
• A finding is about a moment. It describes how a landlord handled a complaint at the time, not what that landlord is like today.
• Recency skew. The Ombudsman’s library surfaces recent decisions most readily, so this set leans recent.

The decisions

The finding shown is the most severe recorded on the condition of the home. Where a decision determined nothing about the condition of the home, that is shown as “—” rather than as a clean record.

The data

Three files, because the data has three shapes. Every row carries the excerpt from the decision that evidences it, so any value can be checked against the source.

• Issues (57 rows) — one row per determined issue, with its scope, finding and defect categories.
• Awards (73 rows) — one row per award, with who awarded it and whether it is a total or a component.
• Orders and recommendations (69 rows) — an order binds a landlord; a recommendation does not.

By landlord

The same decisions grouped by the landlord they concern, for readers who came here because of who their landlord is rather than what went wrong: landlords in the index. That listing is not a ranking, and the number of decisions against a landlord reflects what we read rather than how often it is complained about.

Citing this

You are welcome to quote or link to this page. Please cite it as an exploratory source-verified set rather than a representative study, and link to the individual Ombudsman decision for any specific case. The methodology sets out how the data was produced and checked, and what it cannot tell you. If you find an error we will correct it and say what changed.