Update: We’re working hard to get our services back to normal. But at the moment it could take us up to seven days to contact you after you’ve made a complaint.
We’ll always tell you who is dealing with your complaint. Our insurance team handle some issues, like injury or damage to property, outside of our complaints process. Most complaints follow these two key stages:
Stage one
Contact us with your complaint within six months of the event taking place.
We will always try to resolve your complaint quickly, at first point of contact if we can.
Sometimes, it is appropriate to issue a first and final response to a complaint at stage one. If this happens we will discuss it with you. You can still take your complaint to the next stage, although if there is no new information the response at stage two may be the same.
Our aim is to provide you with a decision on your complaint within ten working days. In some cases, we may need more time to complete our investigation. If we do, we’ll let you know why and give you a date when we will provide our response. This will not be longer than a further ten working days.
Our response will include:
- a review of what has happened
- our decision about the complaint
- details of next steps, including what we will do to put things right
Often, the next steps to resolve your complaint will include actions for us to carry out.
This could include:
- an inspection of your home
- repair work
- working with other people like your local council
These actions may need a reasonable amount of time to organise. We will tell you about actions, timescales and responsible people in our response.
We will keep your complaint open until we have fulfilled our commitment to you.
If you are not happy with our response at stage one, you can ask us to consider your complaint at stage two. Please let us know if you wish to escalate your complaint within eight weeks of your stage one outcome.
To assist us with the review of your stage one complaint we will ask you to provide the following:
- what part of your stage one complaint remains unaddressed or outstanding
- what part of our response you disagree with and why
- what would you like the outcome of your complaint to be (what would you like us to do)
Stage two
This is the final stage of our complaints procedure.
A senior member of our team looks at stage two complaints by reviewing:
- the actions taken at stage one
- additional information
It’s not a repeat of the full investigation. We check the actions and decisions taken at stage one was thorough, reasonable and fair.
We aim to give you our decision within 20 working days.
Sometimes we need longer than 20 days to look at new information. If this happens we will take a further ten working days. We’ll contact you to tell you why and do everything we can to resolve it as soon as possible.
We will keep you updated with progress. And we’ll agree timescales for outstanding actions with you.
We are here to help. But we may refuse to deal with a complaint or deal with it differently if you act unreasonably. And in some circumstances we may be unable to deal with your complaint within our normal procedure. If this happens, we’ll discuss this with you in more detail.
