A housing association that rents out thousands of homes across England including many in Buckinghamshire has been ordered to pay tenants over £140,000 after a period of 'significant failure'. 

Following an investigation carried out by the Housing Ombudsman, London & Quadrant (L&Q) has been given a 'maladministration' rate of 13%, more than double the national average, for issues including anti-social behaviour, damp and mould, and failure to carry out repairs and handle residents' complaints. 

Richard Blakeway, Housing Ombudsman for the UK, said the scale of the findings in the report, which was released today (July 27), indicated "a period of significant failure" in L&Q's provision of services.

"Resident concerns were repeatedly dismissed or poorly handled, without the respect they or their issues deserved. Crucially, the needs of vulnerable residents were not always identified and too often this caused serious detriment and risk to them."

Alongside laying out over 500 actions for the housing association to take, including apologising to tenants and administering repairs, the Ombudsman also awarded £141,860 in resident compensation.

In one anonymised example cited in the report, L&Q told a resident they would only receive compensation for damages to their property if they agreed to add a confidentiality clause to the tenancy agreement. 

Internal emails also showed L&Q staff suggesting that a supervisor be sent to a property in the place of a surveyor because "at least he looks like the surveyor". 

There were also multiple accounts of the housing provider failing to address issues of damp and mould at their properties and engaging in record keeping malpractice. 

Mr Blakeway said: "Rather than address the core issues, the landlord continued to firefight individual issues. This resulted in new policies, initiatives and reports, which failed to resolve its cultural failures in areas like repairs and complaints.

"Its residents deserve better; they are impatient to see change."

In April 2022 the Bucks Free Press spoke to a woman from High Wycombe whose partner's health issues had been exacerbated by damp and mould in their L&Q-owned home.

Tina Burvill said she had tried to contact the housing association multiple times over the prior two years but was told by L&Q that it "wasn't their problem".

A representative for the company said at the time that repair works would begin in the following months and attributed the delay to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Fiona Fletcher-Smith, L&Q's chief executive, acknowledged the Housing Ombudsman's findings and said she recognised the provider had "got things wrong".

"The Ombudsman’s investigation draws conclusions from complaints made between March 2019 and October 2022 – a period when our services were severely disrupted by the coronavirus pandemic.

"As the Ombudsman has recognised, when I became Chief Executive in 2021, the Board and I put in place a new five-year improvement and investment strategy to tackle the problems that had emerged. This was developed through listening to residents, and resolutely focused on the safety and quality of existing homes and services.

She added: “My senior leadership colleagues and I are personally contacting the residents whose complaints the Ombudsman judged to have involved service failure or maladministration on our part.

“We have apologised for the completely unacceptable service they have received. L&Q has let them down and I’m truly sorry for that.”