Private Eye reports that LBWF is England’s third most complained about council, while LBWF admits its own complaints procedure is so bad it brings ‘financial and reputational’ risks

The latest issue of Private Eye (no.1681, 07/08-20/08/26) includes the following:

Coincidentally, the LBWF 2025-26 Annual Governance Statement (AGS) has just been published, and this gives a dismal picture of how LBWF handles its own complainants.

The AGS starts with the frank admission that ‘the current level of overdue complaints across both Stage 1 and Stage 2 does not meet the standards set out by the Ombudsmen, nor does it align with the level of customer service the council expects to provide to its residents’, and then goes on to explain why this is happening:

What’s even more alarming, though, is that the AGS for 2024-25 made almost exactly the same points, and then outlined a raft of ameliorative measures, so it appears that for all its reassuring words, in reality LBWF doesn’t see this as any kind of priority.

Needless to say, this level of almost comic incompetence wastes much LBWF time, and thus imposes significant loss of public money.

But, of course, it also vexes residents, and wastes their time too, as a recent case demonstrates.

After exhausting the inhouse procedures, a LBWF tenant took her complaint to the Housing Ombudsman Service and won, with the adjudication including these observations:

‘There were gaps in the evidence provided to us by the landlord [LBWF], which has affected our assessment in this case. It is unclear if this indicates a record keeping failure and/or an omission in its response to our request for information. Landlord’s [sic] need to ensure they have effective and robust systems in place to hold accurate records…

As noted above, the landlord’s communications with the resident were not adequate. Landlords need to ensue they have clear and effective communication with resident [sic] and ensure they respond within a reasonable timeframe’.

This was a happy outcome for the resident, but came at the cost of her having to save all the relevant documents, marshal her case, and then patiently explain it to first LBWF and then the Housing Ombudsman Service, tasks that used up time and effort she would rather have spent on doing something else.

LBWF frequently boasts it puts residents first, but as this blog has reported again, and again, and again, that is just hot air, and the truth is almost precisely the opposite.