The Housing Ombudsman is seeking views and feedback from residents, landlords, advocacy agencies, representative groups, MPs and councillors on its Business Plan 2025-26 and Corporate Strategy for the next 5 years.  

The consultation runs from Thursday 6 March to Monday 31 March and provides an opportunity to shape the work of the Ombudsman to support a thriving housing sector. 

The demand for the Ombudsman’s service has more than doubled in the last 2 years and its statutory role has also expanded.  

The Ombudsman’s Corporate Strategy proposes 4 objectives: 

• provide an excellent, person-centred service 

• drive positive local complaints handling cultures 

• support better services through insights, data, and intelligence 

• extend powers and engage with partners to support closing gaps in redress   

These objectives focus on: 

• improving the customer journey through its own service by reducing the time it takes to investigate each complaint, with most cases to investigated within 6 months by the end of the strategy period 

• fair treatment of resident complaints across England and focus on leadership and governance, particularly the role of the Member Responsible for Complaints, in supporting positive complaint handling cultures  

• enabling open source of our casework data and sharing learning from complaints with the sector to improve services and prevent complaints needing Ombudsman intervention- this will build on the Centre for Learning, which now has over 12,000 users 

The strategy also sets out its plan to transform systems, processes, and how it will develop its people to deliver an effective and efficient service, now and into the future.  

Making impact in these areas is crucial as the Ombudsman is forecast to handle 43,000 this year, with demand increasing following another record year of complaints in 2023-24.

The Ombudsman is not proposing to increase the fee it charges members in 2025-26.