Ombudsman to keep 'naming and shaming' of agents under review

Wednesday 23rd November 2011

The Property Ombudsman is to keep the idea of ‘naming and shaming’ agents under review, although consumer pressure could grow to shed the secrecy covering agents against whom complaints are regularly upheld.

The Property Ombudsman also revealed that it has been discussing the idea of a league table that would name agents.

The organisation confirmed its stance after the Legal Ombudsman announced that it is to start naming and shaming individual lawyers and law firms from next April.

The Legal Ombudsman will only name and shame where there is a pattern of complaints against individual lawyers or law firms, or when it is in the public interest to do so.

The Property Ombudsman currently publishes some anonymous case study data along with statistics, which are also anonymous. The scheme almost never names agents, but has done so on the rare occasions that it has reported agents that it has expelled to the OFT – which, unlike the Ombudsman, has powers to ban agents from trading altogether.
 
The Legal Ombudsman is to go much further with its new ‘naming lawyers – protecting consumers’ policy, whilst acknowledging that publication of names could damage the businesses it identifies. The identity of complainants will remain confidential.

Consumer minister Ed Davey said of the Legal Ombudsman’s decision: “I am pleased the ombudsman has decided to publish this data. This will make the legal profession stronger, improve service standards and consumers will be better protected as a result.”

A spokesman for the Property Ombudsman told EAT that naming and shaming is something that is often discussed and will be kept under review.

He added: “Publishing league tables is something we have considered in the past and continue to discuss internally. However, the difficulty with league tables is that they can provide an unbalanced comparison of one agent against another.
 
“For example, in Case 1, Agent A may have failed to have obtained confirmation of a tenant’s previous address, but does obtain suitable and acceptable financial references. The tenancy goes ahead and the tenant falls into rent arrears. The landlord complains that references were not undertaken correctly and the Ombudsman supports the complaint to the extent that confirmation of the previous address was not obtained.
 
“In Case 2, Agent B has failed to obtain suitable financial references, but all other references are received. The tenancy goes ahead and the tenant falls into rent arrears. The landlord complains that references were not undertaken correctly and the complaint is supported. However, in this case the Ombudsman’s award would be much higher as the severity of the failure and its impact on the tenancy is much greater.
 
“The problem is that a league table would show Agent A and Agent B as having one complaint supported against them for referencing failures. To the public reading such a table, both agents would appear to them in the same light. However, that would be unfair to Agent A.
 
“As you can see, even if the complaint does concern the same issue, two cases are unlikely to be the same. To therefore attempt to reflect this information in a statistical form, without explanation of the specific details of each case, would present an unbalanced view of the Ombudsman’s decisions and result in an unfair comparison of the agents themselves.”
 
The spokesman added: “This doesn’t even take into account the basic problem that bigger agencies, by the scale of their operations, will attract more complaints than the smaller ones.”
 
“The system TPO currently uses does ensure that the worst offenders are ‘named and shamed’ and are reported to the appropriate regulatory bodies.

“I am not saying that it is a perfect system. However, we have not yet seen an alternative which accurately and fairly condenses the Ombudsman’s decisions into a form that enables the public to make a balanced comparison of agents.
 
“That said, it is certainly a subject that remains open for us and one which we are happy to discuss further.”