We are pleased to introduce a brand-new quarterly blog from Tallia Langston, newly appointed Member of the Board Responsible for Complaints (MRC).
Tallia is also a tenant, Board Member, and Sub-Committee Member here at Saffron Housing Trust.
Tallia has many responsibilities as MRC, and those responsibilities are all about making sure that we listen and learn from every complaint. Says Tallia, “I was honoured and excited when asked to take on this role, because I love complaints! Complaints help organisations learn, improve and put things right.”
Who am I and what is MRC?
Welcome to the first edition of my quarterly blog as Member of the Board Responsible for Complaints (MRC) for Saffron. I’m Tallia Langston: a tenant, a Board Member, and Sub-Committee Member here at Saffron Housing Trust. In April I also became MRC.
If you’d like to read my Board profile, please click the link here: www.saffronhousing.co.uk/about-us/our-people/
In April, Housing Associations like ours embraced a new set of regulations. Those regulations added new roles and many fantastic changes to the ways we’re inspected - and expected - to run our Housing Association.
MRC is one of the new roles introduced. It stands for Member Responsible for Complaints, and was introduced by The Housing Ombudsman.
I have 15 responsibilities as MRC, and those responsibilities are all to help make sure that we at Saffron listen and learn from every complaint. We call this a positive complaint handling culture.
If you’d like to read more about my 15 responsibilities, then please click the link below:
www.housing-ombudsman.org.uk/centre-for-learning/key-topics/mrc/expectations-for-the-role/
I was honoured and excited when asked to take on this role, because I love complaints! Complaints help organisations learn, improve and put things right. Complaints also demonstrate that people feel safe and empowered to tell us what went wrong.
My role as MRC is to champion a positive complaints-handling culture, and to make sure that themes and patterns staff see in any complaint are addressed, all the way from Tenant to Board.
My role isn’t to respond to complaints individually. The complaints team are still the fantastic and dedicated people who will be listening and responding to your individual complaints. They can be reached by email at complaints@saffronhousing.co.uk, by phone on 01508 532000, or by speaking to any member of staff at Saffron, including Housing Officers.
I will be reading some individual complaints when I complete my complaints audits, and in future I’m hoping tenants and residents who have chosen to become Members of Saffron will help me with those audits once individual complaints have been anonymised.
If you’d like to sign up to become one of our Members, please click here: Be a Saffron Community Member - Saffron Housing
Look out for my next MRC Blog in December.
Tallia.