A customer service officer will log and share your feedback with the relevant colleague and provide a response, if required, within five working days.

Our customer service officers will aim to resolve your concern/s as soon as possible, and respond within five working days. If you are dissatisfied with the way that your concerns have been handled or we have not been able to provide a resolution within this time, we can begin our complaints process. However, you may commence a formal complaint at any time.

If you make a formal complaint, we will:

• Acknowledge your complaint within five working days.
• Ensure we have a full understanding of your complaint and clarify anything we are unsure about.
• Provide you with the details of the manager who will be overseeing your complaint.
• Resolve your complaint quickly and fairly and write to you to explain what we have done or will do to put things right. Our aim is to reach a satisfactory conclusion within 10 working days of logging the issue.
• If new issues are raised during this stage of the investigation, the complaint handler will try to incorporate these (if relevant) into their investigation and subsequent response. However, if the new issue(s) will cause an unreasonable delay to the stage 1 response, it will be logged as a new complaint.
• If you remain dissatisfied with the solutions offered at the end of this stage, you have 15 days in which to tell us you wish to escalate the complaint (stage 2).
• Write to you once your complaint has been closed to understand how satisfied you are with how we handled it.

Read our:

Customer Feedback Information Sheet

Customer Feedback Policy

If you make a formal complaint and this is escalated to stage 2, we will:

Pass your complaint to the relevant Director who will carry out a full review of your complaint and respond to you within 20 working days of escalation, in writing.

The Housing Ombudsman Service introduced a new Complaint Handling code in July 2020 setting out good practice to allow us, and other landlords, to respond to complaints effectively and fairly. The Code was reviewed in 2021, and the Ombudsman has updated it with changes being introduced in April 2022 to support a ‘positive complaint handling culture’.

The purpose of the Code is to enable landlords to resolve complaints raised by their residents quickly and to use our Learning from Complaints process to drive service improvements. It will also help to create a positive complaint handling culture amongst staff and residents.

Brighter Places fully supports the Code and we are assessing our current practices and implementing any changes needed in response to updated Code in line with the Ombudsman’s required deadline of October 2022.  You can find out more about the Code and changes at:

The Housing Ombudsman Service

We are required to carry out a self-assessment against the Code and present our findings to the Board every year. Brighter Places does this annually or whenever we introduce major service changes that may affect customer’s satisfaction.

Our latest assessment was published in September 2022.

Read Brighter Places self-assessment