Aster hosts virtual 'Meet the Housing Ombudsman' event

As part of our increased engagement and collaboration with the Housing Ombudsman Service, we were pleased to welcome Housing Ombudsman Richard Blakeway to a virtual ‘Meet the Housing Ombudsman’ event held on Tuesday 23 July.

The event saw customers from our Customer Community Network, one of our board committees, join with senior leaders from Aster and members of our complaints team to hear from the Ombudsman.

It’s the second time we have come together to hold a session of this nature, which provides useful and insightful updates as we seek to learn both best practice and where mistakes have been made, to further improve our approach to resolving any complaints you may have.

During the session, Richard discussed:

• the political changes led by the recent change in Government, and the start of a new regulatory environment
• the strategic role that complaints can play for housing associations
• current demands and challenges that the housing sector is facing and how it is learning lessons and acting on these.

In addition, we were able to share with Richard our own best practice in relation to how we have modernised and improved our complaints handling to improve the customer experience. This included how we learn from both our own complaints casework and that of the wider sector along with how we use a more efficient and visible system to track complaints.

Richard was impressed that we have over 1,600 customers in our involved customer groups, representing your views and making positive changes to our services. If you’d like to know more about how you can be involved, please contact us to find out what opportunities are available.

You can find out more about our complaints process on our dedicated complaints webpage – and if you do have a complaint to make about our services, we’d like to hear from you.