Our services

Making a complaint

We welcome our members indicating issues where we can improve. If there is something we could get better, then we want to hear about it.

A complaint is an expression of dissatisfaction, however made, about the standard of service, actions or lack of action by the co-op, by our housing team or by others acting on the co‑op’s behalf, affecting an individual member or group of members.

A complaint, whether justified or not, may be about something that the co-op should or should not have done or has done badly or has done or not done in accordance with its policies.  A complaint may also be about a complainant feeling that they have not been treated fairly or they have been discriminated against in the provision of a service.

You can make:

• an informal complaint – which means we will try to address the problem you are raising as quickly as we can or
• a formal complaint – which means we will also try to address the problem quickly, but we will also manage the complaint formally in accordance with our complaints policy available here.

We need complaints to be set out on our complaints form (available here), but we can assist you in completing the form if you want us to.

Complaints should be raised through our housing team who will address your concerns in the first instance.

However, you can get help if you are not happy with our services from:

1. the co-op office – we want to help our members get the services they need and want. If you wish to raise issues with us, please contact the Chair directly on 07817 643492 or email Jaimini.B@belgravecoop.org.uk or contact us at our office on 01165 020888 or email Shaan.Admin@belgravecoop.org.uk
2. the Housing Ombudsman Service – the Ombudsman’s staff can provide advice and guidance on making complaints. As well as this, if you have exhausted our complaints policy, you can refer your complaint to the Housing Ombudsman Service and they will do what they can to get a resolution between you and us and we will comply with what they tell us to do.

The Housing Ombudsman has published a Complaint Handling Code which sets out their expectations of how we should manage complaints. Part of that is that we should do a self-assessment of our complaints policy and the complaints we have received. We have done a self-assessment, and this is downloadable from here

You can contact the Housing Ombudsman Service here

There are various parts to our Complaints Policy, but a formal complaint involves the following:

• an investigation of the complaint, which will probably involve interviews with the complainant and anyone else involved
• BNCHA formally stating our position on the complaint – ie. whether we think the complaint was justified or not and what we are going to do about it
• if the complainant is not happy with our position – they can request a review of the complaint and someone different will hear the review.

Please note that anti-social behaviour, harassment, neighbour disputes and complaints about how the co-op is governed are handled in different ways to complaints about our services.