Make a complaint
Give a compliment
More information about complaints
Satisfaction surveys
After we’ve helped you – like fixing something in your home or speaking to you on the phone – you might get a text or email. It will ask how happy you were with our service.
You’ll be asked to give a score from 1 to 5:
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1 means you were very unhappy
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5 means you were very happy
You can also tell us why you gave that score.
We read all your comments and use them to improve what we do.
If you're unhappy, we’ll try to get in touch quickly to sort out any problems.
We love hearing good things, too, and we always share kind words with our staff and contractors.
Complaints FAQs
What is the process for complaints?
We have a simple complaints process involving just two stages. Once we have received your complaint, we will write to you within two working days providing you with details of who will be looking into the complaint and when you should receive a response.
What are Stage One Complaints?
A Stage One complaint will be looked at by a manager, who will contact you to talk about how to fix the problem.
We aim to send you a full written reply within 10 working days. If you raise new complaints while we’re still looking into things, we’ll include them if they’re relevant and we haven’t finished our response yet. If they’re not relevant or would slow things down too much, we’ll treat them as a new complaint.
We’ll keep you updated and reply within the time we promise. If we can’t do this, we’ll let you know what we’re doing and give you a new deadline of no more than 10 more days. We’ll ask if you’re happy with this plan. If not, we’ll close the complaint and send you our final response in writing, along with information about how to take it to Stage Two or to the Housing Ombudsman.
What are Stage Two Complaints?
What if I'm not happy with how my complaint was handled?
The Housing Ombudsman Service is a free and fair organisation that helps sort out problems between social housing tenants and their landlords. You can contact them for advice and help if you're not happy with how we have handled your complaint.
When will a complaint be closed?
Why might a complaint not be accepted?
We will usually accept a complaint unless there’s a good reason not to. Every case is looked at on its own.
We might not accept a complaint if:
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The issue happened more than 12 months ago (unless it’s about safety or safeguarding).
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The same complaint has already been looked at and answered.
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Legal action is already being taken about the issue.
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The complaint is about someone breaking their tenancy, unless it’s about how we handled it.
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The complaint is about something we don’t provide.
If we don’t accept your complaint, we’ll write to explain why. You can still ask the Housing Ombudsman to look into our decision.
Who is responsible for how complaints are handled at North Star?
To help us handle complaints well and learn from them, we’ve chosen two key people to lead this work:
Joanne Todd – Board Member Responsible for Complaints: Joanne makes sure we have a positive complaint-handling culture. She also keeps the Board updated on how we’re doing at handling complaints.
Carole Richardson – Executive Director of Customers. She looks at patterns in complaints to spot any big problems or changes we need to make.
This helps us make sure we are compliant with the Housing Ombudsman Code of Practice.
What is a service request?
If you tell us something isn’t right, but we can fix it quickly without using our full complaints process, this is called a Service Request. We aim to sort these out within three working days.
We’ll check with you to see if you’re happy with what we’ve done. If you’re still not happy, you can make a complaint.
Examples of this can include resolving an issue about a repair or an appointment.