Every member of Guinness Northern Counties staff has been trained to take a customer complaint. The first step is take full details of your complaint and then send a letter to acknowledge your complaint within 2 working days.

The letter will outline the complaint procedure in full, and provide a summary of your complaint so there is no confusion about the nature of the complaint. The acknowledgement letter will tell you who in the local office will be responsible for investigating your complaint. The local office will then have up to 10 working days to send you a full response to your complaint. We hope you will be satisfied with the response to your complaint, however if you are not you can progress the complaint further.

The Director’s Response

If the full response from your local office does not resolve your complaint to your satisfaction you need to let us know within 10 working days. Once you get back to us the complaint will be looked at again by the Director. The Director will then write to you with his or her response within 10 working days. We hope you will be satisfied with the response to your complaint, however if you are not you can still progress the complaint further.

The Complaint Panel

If you get back in touch with us within 10 working days to say you are dissatisfied with the Director’s response your complaint will go to a Complaints Panel. A Complaints Panel is made up of up of members from the Association’s Management Board, Regional Committees, and residents of the Association, who will independently review your case. The Complaints Panel is the final stage of the Guinness Northern Counties complaint procedure.

If you remain dissatisfied

Once you have been through every stage of the complaint procedure you can take your complaint to the Housing Ombudsman Service (this link opens in a new window).

This is a service for residents who have a complaint that has not been resolved through their landlord’s complaint procedures. Please note that you can only ask the Ombudsman to investigate your complaint once you have exhausted your landlord’s complaint procedures.