Summary: We will not investigate this complaint about the Council’s assessment of disrepair in a private rented property under its Housing Act 2004 duties. There is insufficient evidence of any significant fault which would warrant an investigation.

The complaint

1. Ms X complained about the Council’s investigation of her complaints about disrepair in her private rented home. She says officers visited on 3 occasions and were too inexperienced or incompetent to identify or deal with all the repair issues she has been facing since August 2024.

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The Ombudsman’s role and powers

2. We investigate complaints about ‘maladministration’ and ‘service failure’, which we call ‘fault’. We must also consider whether any fault has had an adverse impact on the person making the complaint, which we call ‘injustice’. We provide a free service but must use public money carefully. We do not start or continue an investigation if we decide:

• there is not enough evidence of fault to justify investigating, or
• we could not add to any previous investigation by the organisation, or
• further investigation would not lead to a different outcome.

(Local Government Act 1974, section 24A(6), as amended, section 34(B))

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How I considered this complaint

3. I considered information provided by the complainant and the Council.
4. I considered the Ombudsman’s Assessment Code.

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My assessment

5. Ms X complained to the Council about disrepair in her private rented home in August 2024. The Council sent an officer to assess the property under the HHSRS enforcement provisions under the Housing Act 2004. Ms X says the officer was inexperienced and criticised her procedures. However, following the visit the Council served an improvement notice on the landlord the following month.
6. Ms X reported further problems with her home and in November another officer visited. She says he took temperature readings using an inaccurate procedure which gave incorrect readings on the heating levels. She also says that other issues such as defective cooker extractor were missed.
7. When Ms X raised further issues in April 2025 a third officer visited and told her that the landlord had met the defects identified in the improvement notice. She was unhappy with workmanship of the repairs but the officer dismissed this as cosmetic. She made a complaint to the Council.
8. The Council upheld part of her complaint about the manner in which the third officer conveyed information and that the cooker extractor should have been checked rather than taking the landlord’s word for it. However, it did not accept her concerns about the improvement notice issues.
9. We will not investigate this complaint further. The Council responded to Ms X’s initial complaint and took action in the form of a statutory notice. We cannot determine if the notice included all the issues which she had reported but under the HHSRS guidance only category 1 disrepair can form the basis of the notice. Ms X says the extractor was broken from 2022 but we cannot corroborate this and it was not a category 1 hazard.
10. The assessment of the hazards is for the Council to determine and other matters which arose after the notice was served could not be added to it. Any other hazards identified in the property are discretionary matters for the Council to take action on.
11. The Ombudsman is not an appeal body. This means we do not take a second look at a decision to decide if it was wrong. Instead, we look at the processes an organisation followed to make its decision. If we consider it followed those processes correctly, we cannot question whether the decision was right or wrong, regardless of whether someone disagrees with the decision the organisation made.
12. The Council responded to Ms X’s reports of disrepair and took action. It is not our role to investigate the details of the disrepair and we cannot offer a second opinion on what took place during the inspections.

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Final decision

13. We will not investigate this complaint about the Council’s assessment of disrepair in a private rented property under its Housing Act 2004 duties. There is insufficient evidence of any significant fault which would warrant an investigation.

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Investigator's decision on behalf of the Ombudsman