Metropolitan Thames Valley Housing (MTV) · Case 202205696 · 13 January 2026
Metropolitan Thames Valley Housing (MTV) — case 202205696
The Ombudsman found maladministration in the landlord’s handling of the landlord’s handling of the resident’s mutual exchange application. Our decision (determination) We are unable to investigate the complaint because it is outside of our jurisdiction. Summary of rea.
The full determination
Decision Case ID 202205696 Decision type Jurisdiction Landlord Metropolitan Thames Valley Housing (MTV) Landlord type Housing Association Occupancy Assured Tenancy Date 13 January 2026 Background The resident applied for a mutual exchange, to another property owned by the landlord, on 13 May 2022. On 17 June 2022, the landlord informed the resident that it was declining the exchange. It said this was because the other property had a stairlift, which the resident did not require.
What the complaint is about The complaint is about the landlord’s handling of the resident’s mutual exchange application. Our decision (determination) We are unable to investigate the complaint because it is outside of our jurisdiction. Summary of reasons We are only able to investigate complaints which have exhausted a landlord’s own internal complaints procedure, unless there is evidence of a complaint handling failure. The resident first contacted us on 19 June 2022, asking to make a complaint about her landlord’s handling of the mutual exchange.
We advised her that she needed to make a complaint directly to her landlord before we could investigate the matter. At some point following this, the resident made a complaint to the landlord. The landlord provided her with its stage 1 complaint response on 1 September 2022. On 28 September 2022, we advised the resident to escalate her complaint to stage 2 of the landlord’s complaints process if she remained dissatisfied. The resident contacted us on 1 February 2023. She said that she had escalated her complaint with the landlord but not received a response.
We emailed the resident on 31 March 2023. We asked her to provide us with a copy of her request for the landlord to escalate the complaint. The resident did not reply to this email. We have made enquiries with the landlord, which has told us it never received a request to escalate the complaint to stage 2. Due to this, the complaint did not exhaust the landlord’s internal complaints procedure. We have not seen any evidence to indicate that this was due to a complaint handling failure.
As such the complaint is outside of our jurisdiction to investigate.
This is a structured summary of a published determination. The official decision is the authoritative record. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.