We always try to resolve your dissatisfaction when you first tell us about it. And if we can’t then we promise to monitor your complaint and keep in touch while we're looking into it. We have a detailed complaint policy, and we learn from your feedback to improve our services.
We welcome feedback and we’ll try to resolve your dissatisfaction when you first tell us about it. Quickly and simply. We monitor all feedback so we can understand where we may need to improve our services. Our customer resolution team handle most of our complaints, but you may be contacted by another specialist within the organisation.
We define a complaint as ‘an expression of dissatisfaction, however made, about the standard of service, actions or lack of action by us or our staff, or those acting on our behalf, affecting an individual resident or group of residents.
Stage 1 Investigation
If we’re unable to resolve things straight away, or you request a formal investigation, we will investigate this as a Stage 1 Complaint. This is managed by an appropriate complaint investigator and is part of our complaint process.
A complaint investigator will contact you to acknowledge your complaint within 5 working days. This helps them fully understand your complaint and what you’d like us to do to put things right before carrying out their investigation.
Their investigation will take up to 10 working days, when they’ll provide a full response. If this isn’t possible, they’ll keep you informed and advise when you should expect a full response. We'll always provide this in writing.
Stage 2 Review
If you are not satisfied with the outcome of your Stage 1 complaint, you’ll need to let us know within 15 working days from the date on your Stage 1 written response.
We’ll ask:
It needs to be about the same issue we investigated at Stage 1 . If you have a new issue , you should request a new stage 1 investigation.
We’ll let you know within 5 working days if we have accepted your request to escalate to Stage 2.
Where a request for a Stage 2 review is accepted, a senior investigator will look into things and provide their outcome within 20 working days. If this isn’t possible, we’ll keep you informed of progress and advise when you should expect a full response.
A Stage 2 review is not a new investigation of the issue, but a review of the Stage 1 outcome and if we reached the right decision. If we didn’t, we’ll put things right for you and learn from this to ensure we put things right. Stage 2 is the final stage of our complaints process.
You can find out more about our complaints process and what you can expect from us in our Complaints Policy. You can find it on our policies page and you can hear our approach to complaints in this video
Housing Ombudsman
We're proud to work with the Housing Ombudsman Service to continually review and improve our services. They can be contacted at: www.housing-ombudsman.org.uk
Write to: Housing Ombudsman Service, PO Box 1484, Unit D, Preston, PR2 0ET
Phone: 0300 111 3000
Online: https://www.housing-ombudsman.org.uk/residents/
You can find out more information about how they work with customers and landlords by visiting www.housing-ombudsman.org.uk.
We're sorry you're not happy with our service. If we're aware of the situation but haven't been able to resolve things for you, please read the guidance above to understand how we'll manage complaints during this period.
We're currently making improvements to our systems and services, so some of the ways you can make a complaint have temporarily changed.
Between Friday 13 November to Monday 23 November, you can make a complaint by:
Calling 0800 652 0898. Our partner, Careium, will take the details of your complaint and pass them on to us. We'll contact you about your complaint within 5 working days.
Emailing makeacomplaint@vividhomes.co.uk. We've set up this temporary email service while our Chat and WhatsApp are unavailable. We'll contact you within 5 working days. Please ensure you include your full name, address, contact details and tenancy reference if you have it.
Writing to us at:
Customer Resolution Team
Peninsular House
Wharf Road
Portsmouth
PO2 8HB
Thank you for your patience while we make these improvements.
If you find it difficult to call us, you can use Careium's text service during our opening hours from Friday 13 November to Monday 23 November. Information on how to use this service can be found on the accessibility page of our website.
We'll continue to investigate and respond to complaints during this time, in line with our Complaint policy and the Housing Ombudsman complaint handling code . Thank you for your patience and understanding.
We review our complaint processes each year to ensure we meet the requirements of the Housing Ombudsman’s Scheme and accompanying code. The code sets out good practice that allows us and other landlords to respond to complaints effectively and fairly. This includes how we use learning from complaints to drive service improvements. We’ve carried out a self-assessment against the Code which you can view here. This shows how we comply against the requirements.
A requirement of the Ombudsman code is to produce an Annual Complaint Handling and Service Improvement Report, where you can find out how we’ve performed and what we’ve done to improve. We worked with our customers to create this report and you can see this and our governing body’s response here.
Following our customer’s feedback on the report, we removed abbreviations, simplified the language used and increased the font size. We also added images to break up the amount of text and removed graphs, replacing them with simpler views of the data .
To ensure information is available and accessible to a wide audience, we added ‘easy to access’ links to extra information and created a short video highlighting the main points from within the report. You can access this here
The Housing Ombudsman produce an annual summary of our performance for escalated complaint cases, showing how we’ve performed and how we compare to other landlords. Our 2025/26 ‘maladministration’ rate (where the Ombudsman has found failure in our service delivery) was 54% compared to a national average maladministration rate of 62%. We’re committed to working with and learning from Ombudsman cases together with learning from customer feedback to continue developing our services.
We’re also proud to be 100% compliant with all Ombudsman orders with no Complaint Handling Failure Orders
You can find this report here.
If you’re not happy with the way we’ve handled your complaint, you can contact the Housing Ombudsman and they’ll decide if it’s a case they can investigate further.
The Housing Ombudsman publish decisions on the cases they’ve investigated on their website - follow this link to find our cases.