The Housing Ombudsman has formed a new resident panel comprising of customers from housing associations across the UK. Two customers from our VIVID Impact panel, Ian and Christine are part of this team of 600 individuals nationally that make up the resident panel.

Ian explained that the panel works to “make things much easier for a complaint to be made, handled and evolve, with more emphasis upon the customer than there was previously.”

Alongside other members of the panel, Ian and Christine will attend quarterly meetings to review the policies and workings of the Housing Ombudsman’s complaints service. Their next meeting is scheduled for July.

Ian shared that he is “passionate about resident involvement, and feels that the ombudsman panel is, a forward-thinking idea to bring more understanding to the housing sector on resident problems and how they can be handled.”

The Housing Ombudsman is an important service for housing associations and their customers, that provides an avenue for complaints and the process of resolving them to be reviewed if customers feel that it wasn’t handled correctly by their landlord. The newly formed resident panel will help to involve customer voices when making these important decisions.

When asked what being involved in the panel means to them, Ian said “The importance of the panel is obvious to me – it makes residents a part of a process which in the past they seem to have been removed from.”

We look forward to seeing the progress that is made through the formation of this new panel.