Dealing with tenant complaints: a new procedure for Landlord Law members

The purpose of the new landlord legislation, both in England and in Wales, is basically to professionalise renting.

One important aspect of this is dealing with tenant complaints.

The new Ombudsman scheme

In England, the Renters’ Rights Act 2025 promises a new Private Sector Landlord Ombudsman scheme which will, where appropriate, be able to take action against landlords. 

Failure to comply with ombudsman decisions will risk expulsion from the scheme and local authority enforcement action.

The government’s implementation roadmap places the new scheme in phase 2 of the Renters’ Rights Act implementation. Landlords will be required to join when the service is ready for delivery, currently expected in 2028.

The most recent announcement was from the Housing Ombudsman Service, which confirmed that the scheme was still in development.

Before the scheme can be used

However, Ombudsman/redress schemes generally require tenants to complain first to the landlord or agent concerned, to give them an opportunity to resolve their complaint before taking it to the official scheme.

So it behoves you to have a proper complaints procedure in place.

This will enable you to deal with complaints in a timely and consistent manner and hopefully will prevent tenants from needing to contact the Ombudsman scheme (when it is in operation) at all.

Setting up a procedure

To enable you to deal with complaints consistently, it is best to have a proper procedure which can be followed in all cases.  This is useful even if you are a small organisation or landlord with just one property.

To help Landlord Law members with this, we have now developed a complaints procedure, together with forms, which can either be used as it is or adapted to suit the way you work.

The Landlord Law complaints procedure consists of the following:

• Notes on how to use the procedure
• The procedure text for you to provide to tenants
• A complaints form for your tenants to use (if they want to, it should not be mandatory), and
• A complaint record and checklist for you to use, to help you deal with the issue in a timely manner.

We also have a FAQ, and I have referenced the procedure in our Checklists.  The procedure itself is here.

I will, in due course, be adding the procedure to the rest of the procedures which Landlord Law members can include when generating their tenancy agreement or in a separate procedures document.

But Landlord Law members do not need to wait for this to start using the procedure.

You can email your tenants a copy of the procedure text and the complaints form, explaining that these are available to make it easier for them to notify you if they are unhappy about any aspect of your service.

In the meantime, I would welcome any feedback and comments from members about the procedure and suggestions for improvement.