Complaints

Your feedback helps make things better for our customers

Make a Complaint

Your opinion really matters and it is vital in helping us shape and improve the services we deliver to you. You can use this form to make a complaint.

Your Details

Your Name (and Care Provider if applicable)*

Property Address*

Tenant Telephone Contact Number*

Email Address*

Your Feedback

Nature of Contact*

Comment

Compliment

Complaint

Details*

Additional Support

If you require additional support to give us feedback or make a complaint, please let us know. If you consider yourself to be vulnerable or have specific circumstances that may be relevant to your feedback or complaint, please let us know below.

Other ways to make a complaint

You can also make a complaint:

By telephone
By email
In person (by appointment only)
In writing to:
North Star
St Marks Court
Thornaby
Stockton-on-Tees
TS17 6QN
Through another person, such as an advocate, social worker, solicitor, etc.

03000 11 00 11 complaints@northstarhg.co.uk

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?

If you’re not happy with the outcome of Stage One, you can ask us to look at it again. At Stage Two, a senior manager or director will review the complaint and try to sort it out within 10 working days.

Sometimes it might take longer if we need to look into things more deeply. If that happens, we’ll let you know when you can expect a reply.

If we can’t agree on an outcome in this time, we’ll give you the contact details for the Housing Ombudsman. We’ll send you a letter with our final decision and the outcome of the review.

You can contact the Housing Ombudsman at any time for advice or help with your complaint.

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.

Contact the Housing Ombudsman

When will a complaint be closed?

We will close a complaint when we’ve written to you explaining what we’ve done or plan to do to fix the problem.

In this letter, we will explain:

What stage your complaint is at.
What the complaint is about.
What we found out.
Why we made our decision, including any rules or laws we followed.
Any action or payment we’re offering to put things right.
Anything still to be done.
How to contact the Housing Ombudsman if you’re still unhappy.

We will answer all the points you raised and clearly explain our decisions.

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:

The issue happened more than 12 months ago (unless it’s about safety or safeguarding).
The same complaint has already been looked at and answered.
Legal action is already being taken about the issue.
The complaint is about someone breaking their tenancy, unless it’s about how we handled it.
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:

Nicki Clark – Board Member Responsible for Complaints: Nicki 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.