Have you reached the end of the complaint process with your managing agent?
Did you escalate to the Property Ombudsman or the Housing Ombudsman? Waited months for a decision? Maybe even received a payout — an apology, a gesture of goodwill, a modest redress award?
And yet — nothing changed. Same agent. Same problems. Same service charges. Same building.
That isn’t a bug; that’s a feature.
The internal complaint procedure and the Ombudsman scheme exist primarily to keep you in the consumer complaints system. They are designed to resolve disputes at the lowest possible level — and from the agent’s perspective, that is enormously preferable to the alternative.
Because the alternative is the First-tier Tribunal.
And the First-tier Tribunal is a completely different conversation.
An Ombudsman can award compensation. They can issue a rebuke. They can recommend an apology.
They cannot compel an agent to change how they operate. They cannot rule on whether your service charges are legally payable. They cannot order a full account audit. They cannot remove a managing agent from your building.
The First-tier Tribunal can do all of these things. The FTT has the power to:
- Determine whether service charges are reasonable and legally recoverable — meaning charges ruled unreasonable cannot be collected from you.
- Order a full inspection of service charge accounts and demand transparency on expenditure.
- Rule on whether a Section 20 consultation was properly followed — and limit what can be recovered if it wasn’t.
- Issue dispensation decisions on major works costs.
- And in the most serious cases — appoint a new managing agent entirely, removing that power from the freeholder.
That last one is why agents will work very hard to keep your dispute in the complaints process and away from the tribunal. An Ombudsman decision costs them a payout. An FTT decision can cost them the contract — or expose years of unjustifiable charges they can no longer recover.
The FTT is also significantly more accessible than most leaseholders realise. It is not the High Court. Legal representation is not required. Application fees are modest. And yet the outcomes it can deliver are transformative compared to anything the complaints process can offer.
The reason more leaseholders don’t use it is simple: nobody with a financial interest in the status quo explains that it exists.
Rightly Managed helps leaseholders understand when the FTT is the right route, what can realistically be challenged, and how to build a case that gives you the best chance of a meaningful outcome — not just a goodwill payment and a letter of apology.
If you’ve exhausted the complaints process and still have no resolution — contact Rightly Managed today.