Complaints relating to the Council's housing landlord functions
If you are a tenant or leaseholder of Dartford Borough Council and wish to make a complaint about the Council’s housing landlord functions, please see our corporate complaints procedure for details of the process and how to complain. If, having exhausted our corporate complaints procedure, your complaint is not resolved to your satisfaction, you may complain to the Housing Ombudsman.
For complaints about the Housing Service that are not landlord function related, the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman deals with such complaints once they have exhausted our complaints process. These include complaints relating to housing allocations, homelessness, general housing advice, housing improvement grants, anti-social behaviour (other than tenant behaviour) noise nuisance, sale or disposal of land on housing estates and planning and building control (Council owned properties).
Please see the stages of the corporate complaints procedure for the Housing Ombudsman and Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman contact details.
Complaints Performance and Service Improvement Report
The Housing Ombudsman has a Complaint Handling Code that all social housing landlords must follow to ensure they are responding to complaints effectively and fairly.
As a social housing landlord, the Council is required under the Complaint Handling Code to produce an annual complaints performance and service improvement report for scrutiny and challenge, which must include:
- a self-assessment against the Code to ensure the complaint handling policy remains in line with its requirements;
- a qualitative and quantitative analysis of complaint handling performance - including a summary of the types of complaints the landlord has refused to accept;
- any findings of non-compliance with the Code by the Ombudsman;
- the service improvements made as a result of learning from complaints;
- any annual report about the landlord’s performance from the Ombudsman; and
- any other relevant reports or publications produced by the Ombudsman in relation to the work of the landlord.
Read the Annual Complaints Performance and Service Improvement Report
The complaints performance and service improvement report was discussed at Cabinet on the May 22, 2025. Cabinet resolved to note the contents of the report, which covers areas of achievement, such as aligning the Corporate Complaints Policy and Procedure to the Complaint Handling Code, and the steps being taken to further improve complaint handling and learning from complaints. Further opportunities for improvement include to:
- Develop and carry out regular audits on complaints handled to identify efficiency and whether any service improvements should be made.
- Use the tenant satisfaction measures survey and transactional complaints satisfaction survey insights to identify the pain points and actions for where to improve experience.
- Develop a process within the complaints system to record complaint’s refused including service requests.
- Develop a monitoring mechanism to track actions made from complaints.
Cabinet approved the report for publishing and submission to the Housing Ombudsman. Visit the committee page for more information.
Member Responsible for Complaints
Our Member Responsible for Complaints ensures that complaint handling drives learning and service improvement for residents. The role champions a positive complaint handling culture and seeks assurances that complaints are being managed, change is happening and that residents are being heard through the process.
Member Responsible for Complaints: Councillor David J Mote
david.mote@dartford.gov.uk