Service Requests and Complaints About Your Social Housing
This page provides practical information about how to raise a service or maintenance request or make a complaint about your social housing where the Council is the landlord. This including services provided by the Council or by another organisation acting on the Council's behalf.
The Council’s complaints policy sets out the formal complaints process, including how complaints are handled, response timescales and escalation rights.
If you are not sure who manages your home, contact us and we will help direct you to the right route.
Who to contact?
1. Properties managed by Incommunities
If your home is managed by Incommunities on the Council's behalf, you should contact Incommunities directly in the first instance to raise a service/maintenance request or complaint.
Complaints about the Council as landlord form part of the Council's landlord complaints process. You will not be required to use a separate or additional complaints process for the same matter.
Incommunities will explain how your issue will be handled. If it is treated as a complaint, they will tell you how to ask for it to be escalated to Stage 2 if you remain dissatisfied.
Contacting Incommunities:
If you need to report an issue or make a complaint, contact Incommunities directly:
Website: https://www.incommunities.co.uk/contact-us
Email: enquiry@incommunities.co.uk
Resident enquiries: 0330 175 9540 8am to 6pm
Emergency repairs service: available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Incommunities Complaints Process can be found at: https://www.incommunities.co.uk/complaints-and-feedback/
2. Properties managed directly by the Council
Some Council-own homes are managed directly by the Council. This includes Fletcher Court.
If you live in a home managed directly by the Council, service or maintenance requests should be reported to the management or maintenance contact for your building in the first instance.
Fletcher Court service and maintenance requests
For Fletcher Court, service or maintenance requests can be made:
In person at the Housing Office, Scatcherd Road
By Email: fletchercourt@bradford.gov.uk
Or By Telephone 01535 618637
If you do not want to talk to the team or staff member you usually deal with or you have already done this and remain dissatisfied, you can ask to speak to or write to a manager.
If you are unhappy with the response to your service or maintenance request, or you want to make a formal complaint about the Council’s role as landlord, you can raise this with the Council.
Complaints about Council landlord services are handled through the Council’s landlord complaints process.
Raising a complaint to the Council
You can raise a complaint:
Make a complaint about council housing using our online form
Or by email at councilhousing@bradford.gov.uk
Or by Telephone: 01274 436820
Or In writing: Freepost Bradford Council (Please ensure that ‘Corporate Complaints Team’ is clearly written on back of envelope when corresponding by post)
You can also make a complaint through a representative, where consent or authority is provided.
What is a service or maintenance request?
A service or maintenance request is when you ask for something to be done. This could include reporting a repair, asking for an issue to be looked into or requesting action to put something right.
A service or maintenance request is not the same as a complaint. If you are asking the Council, Incommunities or another organisation acting on the Council's behalf to take action for the first time, the matter may be handled as a service or maintenance request.
If you are unhappy with the response to a service or maintenance request, you can ask for the matter to be handled as a complaint.
Making a complaint will not stop, delay or prevent any action needed to deal with the service or maintenance request
What is a Complaint?
The Housing Ombudsman Service defines a complaint as:
‘an expression of dissatisfaction, however made about the standard of service actions, or lack of action by the landlord, its own staff or those acting on its behalf, affecting a resident or group of residents’.
This means you can complain if you are unhappy with something the Council, Incommunities or another organisation acting on the Council's behalf has done or failed to do, in relation to the Council's role as landlord.
You do not need to use the word ‘complaint’. We will consider what you are telling us, what has happened and what outcome you are seeking.
If you need help to use the complaints process
If you need help to access the complaints process, please tell us. We will work with you to understand what support is needed and will take reasonable steps to make the process accessible.
Information about the complaints process can be provided in an alternative format where needed.
You can also ask someone else to complain on your behalf. This could be a family member, friend, advocate, counsellor or other representative.
Where personal information is involved, we may need your consent or proof of authority before sharing information or responding in detail.
How complaints are handled
Complaints about the Council as a landlord are handled through a two-stage complaints process. There is no informal complaint stage.
Where a complaint is handled by Incommunities or another organisation acting on the Council's behalf, it forms part of the council's landlord complaints process.
We will make clear:
- who is handling your complaint
- whether your complaint should be made to the Council or directly to the organisation acting on the Council's behalf
- how your complaint can be made
- whether the organisation will respond at Stage 1 only or at both Stage 1 and Stage 2
- where any escalation request should be sent.
We may try to resolve issues quickly where appropriate, but this will not prevent a complaint from being logged, progressed or responded to under the formal complaints process
Stage 1 (Landlord Complaints)
Stage 1 is the first formal response to your complaint.
Your complaint will be acknowledged, defined and logged within 5 working days of being received.
The acknowledgement will explain:
- our understanding of your complaint
- the outcome you are seeking
- which parts of the complaint will be investigated or responded to under the Council landlord complaints process
- which parts, if any, will not be investigated or responded to under this process and why.
If anything is unclear, we may ask for clarification.
A Stage 1 response will be issued within 10 working days of acknowledgment.
If more time is needed, we will explain the reason, give you a revised response date and tell you how to contact the Housing Ombudsman Service. Any extension will not normally be more than a further 10 working days unless there is a clear and valid reason.
If a response cannot be issued within the timescale, including any agreed extension, we will agree suitable intervals with you for keeping you updated.
Additional issues raised during Stage 1
If you raise additional issues during the Stage 1 investigation, we will include them in the Stage 1 response where they are related to the complaint and the response has not yet been issued.
New or additional issues may be logged as a new complaint where:
- the Stage 1 response has already been issued
- the issues are unrelated
- including them would unreasonably delay the response.
Stage 2 (Landlord Complaints)
If all or part of your complaint is not resolved to your satisfaction at Stage 1, you can ask for it to be considered at Stage 2.
You do not need to provide detailed reasons for requesting Stage 2, although we may ask for clarification where this would help us understand what remains unresolved.
Stage 2 is the final response under the Council landlord complaints process.
A Stage 2 request will be acknowledged, defined and logged within 5 working days of being received.
A Stage 2 response will be issued within 20 working days of acknowledgment.
If more time is needed, we will explain the reason, give you a revised response date and tell you how to contact the Housing Ombudsman Service. Any extension will not normally be more than a further 20 working days unless there is a clear and valid reason.
If a response cannot be issued within the timescale, including any agreed extension, we will agree suitable intervals with you for keeping you updated.
If further action is needed
A complaint response will be issued once the Council's position as landlord is known. It will not be delayed solely because further actions remain outstanding.
Where actions remain outstanding, we will explain what still needs to be done and how you will be kept updated until those actions are completed.
If we decide not to accept a complaint
We may decide that a matter is not suitable for the complaints process. For example, this may include:
- where the matter is a service or maintenance request rather than a complaint
- the issue has already been considered and there is no new substantive information
- another statutory, appeal, tribunal, court or formal review route applies
- the person raising the complaint is not a resident, not a part of an affected group of residents and does not have authority to act on behalf of the affected resident.
We will accept complaints from residents and from representatives acting on behalf of an affected resident or group of residents, where consent or authority has been provided.
If we decide not to accept a complaint about Council landlord services, we will explain the reasons for that decision and tell you about your right to refer the decision to the Housing Ombudsman Service.
Housing Ombudsman Service
Residents with complaints about the Council's actions as landlord may contact the Housing Ombudsman Service at any point during the handling of their complaint for advice and support.
You can contact the Housing Ombudsman Service if you remain dissatisfied after the Council landlord complaints process has finished or if you want advice during the complaints process.
Website: www.housing-ombudsman.org.uk
Phone: 0300 111 3000 (lines are open from Monday to Friday from 9.15am until 5.15pm)
Post: Housing Ombudsman Service, PO Box 1484, Unit D, Preston, PR2 0ET
If your complaint is about something else
This page is about service requests and complaints relating to social housing where the Council is the landlord.
Other complaints, such as corporate complaints, Adult Social Care complaints or data protection complaints, are handled under the Council’s complaints policy or the relevant statutory or regulatory process.
If your complaint includes more than one issue, we will explain which process applies to each part.