Decision report 201200246

Summary

Mr C was unhappy because the housing association told him in late 2011 that they wanted to rewire the property where he lives. He had just finished decorating the house after taking up the tenancy four months earlier. He said the rewiring would affect the decorating he had just done and, in the circumstances, he was not happy with the association's standard offer of a £420 decorating allowance. Mr C said that he should have been made aware, on taking up the tenancy, that a rewiring programme was planned.

We found that the association had been running electrical rewiring contracts since 2007 and that Mr C's property was added to the programme in spring 2011. The association had already acknowledged that they should have checked whether there were any upgrading or modernisation programmes planned before offering him the tenancy and apologised to him. We upheld Mr C's complaint but made no recommendations as we were satisfied with the actions taken by the association to prevent this happening again.

During our investigation, the association told us that they had removed Mr C's property from the rewiring programme and hoped to programme it in again within the next three to five years. We considered this a reasonable resolution to his complaint and were satisfied that the association's offer of a decorating allowance of £420, which is the maximum payable for a property of that size, was also reasonable. We did not uphold this complaint.