Decision Report 201601436

Summary

Miss C complained that the council were unreasonable in their processing of her and her mother (Mrs A)'s mutual exchange application. She also complained that the council failed to assess and carry out repairs to Mrs A's house within a reasonable timescale, and that they failed to respond adequately to her complaints.

We did not uphold Miss C's concerns about the mutual exchange because we were unable to obtain sufficient evidence to allow us to conclude that the mutual exchange was cancelled by the council, as was suggested by Miss C. The council suggested that Mrs A cancelled the mutual exchange. As we did not have sufficient evidence to say who cancelled the mutual exchange, we did not uphold this element of the complaint. We also found that the council acted reasonably in respect of the requested repairs because their records indicated that they attended to every request for repairs, where possible. On the occasions where they failed to do so, their records noted that this was because they were unable to gain access. We therefore did not uphold these aspects of Miss C's complaint.

We did note that the council failed to respond to all the points that Miss C raised in her subsequent complaint, and we noted that their response contained a number of inaccuracies. For this reason, we upheld this aspect of Miss C's complaint.

Recommendations

We recommended that the council:

• apologise to Miss C for their failure to respond to all of her concerns in their complaint responses and for the poor quality of their written responses; and
• reflect on the errors identified in this case and advise us how they will quality-assure future written responses to ensure all points raised are included and name and date errors are identified and corrected.