The Housing Ombudsman Ruled Against Ealing Council 73 Times Out of 83 This Year. Every One of Its Five Worst Failures Was a Leak or Damp Left Unfixed.
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In short. The Housing Ombudsman's Annual Complaints Review for 2025/26 records 37 determinations against Ealing Council, resulting in 83 usable findings [1] [2]. Seventy-three went against the council, an 88 percent maladministration rate against a 62 percent national average, up from 82 percent the year before [2] [3]. The dataset's own category breakdown shows all five of Ealing's severe maladministration findings, its rarest and most serious category, sat inside responsive repairs [2].
The Housing Ombudsman publishes two versions of its annual verdict on a landlord. One is the headline rate that gets quoted: for Ealing Council, 88 percent maladministration in 2025/26 [1]. The other is the underlying spreadsheet the Ombudsman publishes alongside it, a landlord-by-landlord table of determinations, findings and orders that most coverage of the headline rate never opens [2]. That table is where the more specific claim in this piece comes from, and it is checkable by anyone: every one of Ealing's severe maladministration findings this year, the category reserved for failures with a significant impact on a resident, sat inside a single heading, "responsive repairs" [2].
What 83 findings actually cover
Ealing Council owns and manages 15,372 homes across the borough [4]. Over the year to 31 March 2026, 243 cases about the council's housing service reached the Ombudsman, a rate of 15.8 per 1,000 homes against a median of 5.2 among landlords of a similar size and type [4]. Not all of those were decided within the year; the Ombudsman's own count of cases it actually concluded about Ealing in 2025/26 is 44, of which 7 were withdrawn or fell entirely outside its jurisdiction, leaving 37 determinations [2]. Because a single case can raise more than one issue, those 37 determinations produced 85 separate findings, of which 2 fell outside the Ombudsman's jurisdiction, leaving 83 that count toward the council's performance figures [2]. Of those 83, the dataset records 5 severe maladministration, 51 maladministration and 17 service failure findings against the council, 73 in total, against 7 findings of no maladministration and 3 where the Ombudsman found the council had already offered reasonable redress [2]. Seventy-three of 83 is the 88 percent rate quoted everywhere; the same dataset's category tables let it be checked rather than just quoted.
Every severe finding, the same fault
The Ombudsman's category breakdown splits Ealing's 83 findings by subject and by severity in the same table [2]. Responsive repairs is both the largest single category, 38 of the 83 findings, and the worst-performing one: 35 of those 38 went against the council, a 92 percent maladministration rate within the category, and every one of the year's 5 severe maladministration findings sits inside it [2]. Locally reported detail behind those repairs findings, drawn from the same underlying report, describes 15 findings concerning damp and mould, including 2 severe maladministration, and 10 concerning leaks, all 10 upheld, including 3 severe maladministration [4]. That accounts for all 5 of the year's severe findings between two sub-categories: leaks left unresolved, and damp and mould left untreated.
The dataset also tracks compensation ordered and recommended by category. Across all findings against Ealing Council this year the total is 31,800.90 pounds, and the responsive repairs category alone accounts for 26,250.90 pounds of it, more than four-fifths of the money the Ombudsman ordered or recommended the council pay out [2]. The council's next largest category, at 35 findings, is "managing relations", where the Ombudsman found maladministration in 89 percent of cases against a 57 percent national rate for the same category, and where it issued one Complaint Handling Failure Order, a sanction reserved for landlords who fail the statutory Complaint Handling Code during the complaints process itself [2] [4].
The trend runs the wrong way
The Ombudsman publishes the same landlord-level dataset every year, which makes the trend checkable rather than a single bad twelve months. Ealing Council's maladministration rate was 89 percent in 2023/24, fell to 82 percent in 2024/25, and has now risen back to 88 percent in 2025/26 [3] [2]. The 2024/25 dataset puts the council's determinations that year at 23, producing 50 maladministration findings out of 63; this year's 37 determinations and 73 findings against 83 are both a larger caseload and a worse rate [3] [2]. Cllr Louise Brett, Ealing's Deputy Leader, holds the cabinet portfolio covering housing asset management and repairs [5].
Opposition councillors were blunter than the tables. Liberal Democrat group leader Cllr Gary Malcolm said Ealing had "again been shown to be failing", adding: "There are too many cases where residents have been treated badly, too many cases where the council has either failed to act or has acted badly" [4]. Green group leader Cllr Clare Welsby said she was "shocked at the level of maladministration in 88% of its findings concerning Ealing Council, rising from 82% in 2024-25", and called the figure "the worst of the three", against the 62 percent national and 70 percent similar-landlord comparators in the report [4]. Conservative group leader Cllr Julian Gallant said levels of maladministration were "far too high and increasing" and that "a council that prioritises transparency needs to show how improvements will be made, as from now" [4].
An Ealing Council spokesperson said the council had carried out "a comprehensive review of our housing services" and made "significant progress over the last 12 months, particularly with how we have performed in complying with Awaab's Law", while acknowledging "there is still more work to do and we are not complacent" [4]. The council's response did not directly address why its case volume or maladministration rate were as high as the dataset shows, or say whether it accepted the findings pointed to a systemic problem rather than isolated failings [4].
What the spreadsheet settles
A headline rate can be disputed as a snapshot, a bad year, a rounding choice. A category table that shows every severe finding sitting inside one heading, and that heading accounting for most of the money ordered, is harder to argue with, because it is the Ombudsman's own working, not a summary of it. Ealing Council's repairs service produced all five of its worst failures this year. The residents behind those five findings did not experience a maladministration rate. They experienced a leak, or damp, that took a formal Ombudsman ruling to get fixed.
Sources
- Housing Ombudsman Service, "Annual Complaints Review 2025-26". https://www.housing-ombudsman.org.uk/annual-complaint-review-reports/annual-complaints-review-2025-26/
- Housing Ombudsman Service, "Tables for landlords with individual performance report 2025-26" (dataset, last updated 15 September 2026). https://www.housing-ombudsman.org.uk/app/uploads/2026/09/2026-09-10-Tables-for-landlords-with-individual-performance-report-2025-26.xlsx
- Housing Ombudsman Service, "Tables for landlords with individual performance reports 2024-25" (dataset). https://www.housing-ombudsman.org.uk/app/uploads/2025/09/Tables-for-landlords-with-individual-performance-reports-2024-25.xlsx
- EALING.NEWS, Leslie Bunder, "Housing Ombudsman report reveals high rate of Ealing Council housing complaints", 18 September 2026. https://www.ealing.news/news/housing-ombudsman-report-reveals-high-rate-of-ealing-council-housing-complaints/
- Ealing Council, "Cabinet". https://www.ealing.gov.uk/info/201044/councillors/567/cabinet