Meet the Housing Ombudsman event this evening (that RBKC didn’t want residents to know about for “some reason”)

This evening, 5pm at the Small Hall Kensington Town Hall, Hornton Street W8 7NX, there will be a meeting Housing Ombudman Richard Blakeway will be putting in an appearance, to discuss the Ombudsman service and how it can help people (ie. how people can make reports complaints etc)

This meeting sounds to us to be a very good, useful and helpful initiative for residents – but oh what’s that? – RBKC   “forgot” and  for some reason   only just “remembered”  yesterday!!

One day’s notice!  Just fancy that!!

Here is the flyer with a QR code also a link to the Zoom meeting if you cannot make it to the Town Hall this evening:

So sorry for the short notice folks, but we weren’t at all aware of this until late last night.

By the way,  it was  postings on social media  from brilliant housing campaigner Kwajo Tweneboa  that eventually prompted RBKC to stick this on Twitter:

“Sorry you missed our information on this?” Oh that’s right people did – because RBKC didn’t post any information on this!!

Whilst whoever posted that RBKC Tweet seems to regard leaseholders as a different species of residents (!) , we gather that the event is for both tenants and leaseholders of RBKC and whilst the flyer doesn’t make it clear if that includes HA tenants and leaseholders or not, the Ombudsman does deal with complaints about other social landlords – Housing Associations – too so we would think so.

We will not be able to make it tonight (too short notice and we have other meetings at the same time) but we encourage all concerned social housing residents to come if they can and to please do share this widely.

Also for those who cannot make it to the meeting (probably most of us!), here is a link to the Housing Ombudsman Service website- LINK

One more thing – an observant resident (thank you!) has informed us that the Housing Ombudsman Residents Panel is now open for applications – here – LINK. If anyone is interested (and just in case they don’t mention it this evening).

There are mistakes, there is absent-mindedness and then there are deliberate mistakes. We know which one of those that this is. They really don’t want their residents living in the worst RBKC Housing conditions to meet Mr Blakeway and his team, mention their housing problems and to learn how the Ombudsman service works ( because they could get into hot water and have some PR they don’t like!) but thought to go ahead with the event as a “gesture” and “tick box exercise” to pretend they care, all the while fully intending to keep the majority of residents in the dark about it.

RBKC appears to be comfortably back in its bad old ways.

RBKC Lead (Cabinet) Member for Housing Management, Housing Safety and Building New Homes, Cllr Sof McVeigh is usually very good at posting on social media about things but somehow, this seems to have escaped her mind to share with people living in the housing that she is in charge of , but have no fear, THINK will do the honours and we will send a copy of this blog to her to discourage any further such incidents of forgetfulness.