Mould, Maggots and Mismanagement: Does Peabody Have a Maladministration Problem?

Peabody Complaints Archive · Published 18 September 2026

Three published cases reveal the human consequences of failures in repairs, antisocial behaviour and complaint handling. We examined 545 Housing Ombudsman decisions to understand the wider picture.

If your landlord's complaints process does not resolve the problem, you can ask the independent Housing Ombudsman to investigate. Its published decisions provide a public record of what went wrong, how the landlord responded and what the Ombudsman required it to do.

Between January 2022 and September 2026, we identified 545 substantive Housing Ombudsman decisions involving Peabody Trust. Together they contained 1,273 separately recorded findings. We reviewed all 545. What follows are three of those cases, and an examination of the wider picture based on all of the public reports.

The percentages in this article are drawn from published Ombudsman determinations. They are not percentages of all complaints made to Peabody. The Ombudsman investigates cases that residents escalate after completing, or struggling to complete, the landlord's internal complaints process. That is a selected population that shows you what happens when things go wrong enough for someone to persist.

These accounts have been reconstructed from published Housing Ombudsman decisions and condensed for clarity. Names are pseudonyms. No case is a composite, and no material facts have been invented. Links to the original decisions are provided.

Mariam's Story

Mariam had grown up in care and was living on her own in a one-bedroom flat. She was allergic to mould. In December, a leak from the flat above left her walls wet, with fur growing on the plasterboard. She was briefly moved out for repairs in January, but when she returned in March the mould was back. She reported it again in March, April, and May and nobody from Peabody got back to her. In May she wrote to her MP and to Peabody's chief executive: she was six months pregnant, the mould was making her ill, and she could not get a response.

By late August, raw sewage was leaking into her home from the flat upstairs. An electrician found maggots growing out of the plasterboard boxing. Mariam was moved to a hotel, but the bookings were all short-term and she never knew where she would be moved next. Over the next month she was moved between three hotels and a serviced apartment, packing and carrying her belongings each time while heavily pregnant. Professionals supporting her told Peabody repeatedly that a hotel was unsuitable for someone about to have a caesarean: no kitchen, no fridge, nowhere to prepare food or store a baby's milk. Peabody had in fact paid for dinner at the hotels, but never told Mariam. She spent her own money on takeaway each night.

In September she was admitted to hospital with high blood pressure and put on bed rest. She believed the stress of the housing situation had caused it. She had her baby by caesarean while effectively homeless, because Peabody could not find suitable accommodation. The hospital kept her longer than medically necessary because there was nowhere safe for her to be discharged to.

Mariam returned to the flat at the end of October. The repairs were supposed to have been completed during two months of decant. Instead she found the mould had returned, because nobody had checked the bathroom floor. The floorboards underneath were completely rotten, a problem first reported 19 months earlier. Contractors lifted the floor and laid a plank of wood across the exposed joists for Mariam and her mother to walk on. It was not secured. For three days they could not use the toilet or bathroom. Mariam had a six-week-old baby and had recently had major surgery. Contractors were in the property for another two weeks. She later developed postpartum depression and needed therapy.

The Ombudsman found severe maladministration on both the decant and the repairs and ordered just under £5,000 in compensation.

What the wider data shows: repairs

Mariam's case involved four overlapping issues: repairs and maintenance, leaks and water ingress, damp and mould, and temporary accommodation. Across the 545 Ombudsman decisions in our retrieved dataset:

• Decisions: At least one of these issues appeared in 315 decisions, or 57.8% of the dataset.
• Findings: The Ombudsman made 392 distinct findings concerning these issues, representing 30.8% of all 1,273 findings.
• Adverse findings: Of those 392 findings, 271 were findings of maladministration or severe maladministration, an adverse rate of 69.1%.
• Severe maladministration: The Ombudsman made 31 findings of severe maladministration concerning these issues.

The four categories overlap, so these figures count each decision and finding only once rather than adding the individual category totals together. The severity of Mariam's experience was exceptional, but the combination of problems was not unusual. Damp and mould produced the highest adverse rate within this group: 75 of 92 findings, or 81.5%, were adverse.

Ester's Story

Ester lived alone in a ground-floor flat. She lived with mental health conditions and fibromyalgia. She had been reporting problems with a neighbour for months: he banged on her door, screamed at her, approached her and asked her to accompany him places. She reported him to the police twice in one month and gave Peabody the crime reference numbers. There is no evidence Peabody took any action.

The neighbour jumped out at her and shouted. Peabody visited him, received counter-allegations, and decided to monitor the situation. It never told Ester about the counter-allegations and there is no record that it carried out any monitoring. Eggs were thrown at her patio. Peabody said it could not act without evidence but made no attempt to speak to other neighbours or find witnesses.

Then the neighbour entered Ester's garden carrying a knife and damaged her fence. Peabody's own complaint response later stated that the police, the local authority, and a senior manager had all been involved. When the Ombudsman asked for the records of that involvement, Peabody said none could be found.

Across every report Ester made, Peabody could not produce a single risk assessment or action plan. It never established whether she was safe. It did not consider her vulnerabilities, her mental health, or the fact that she was repeatedly telling them she was scared. Ester told Peabody she wanted to leave because she felt unsafe and unsupported. It told her it could not offer a move, but did not explain why or apply its own management-transfer policy for residents at risk of violence and harassment.

Ester told the Ombudsman she was in fear for her life and could not leave her house because of anxiety. The Ombudsman found severe maladministration for ASB handling and ordered £1,425 in compensation. In the end, it was the local authority, not Peabody, that offered Ester a new home. The report does not say whether she moved, or if she is now safe.

What the wider data shows: antisocial behaviour

Ester's case concerned Peabody's response to antisocial behaviour. Across the 545 decisions in our retrieved dataset:

• Decisions: Our dataset combines antisocial behaviour and related noise complaints. At least one of these issues appeared in 89 decisions, or 16.3% of the dataset.
• Findings: The Ombudsman made 97 findings concerning Peabody's handling of antisocial behaviour, representing 7.6% of all 1,273 findings.
• Adverse findings: Of those 97 findings, 67 were findings of maladministration or severe maladministration, an adverse rate of 69.1%.
• Severe maladministration: Two findings were classified as severe maladministration.

The figures show that adverse findings were common when the Ombudsman examined Peabody's handling of antisocial behaviour, although findings at the highest level of severity were rare. Ester's case accounted for one of only two severe maladministration findings in this category.

Susan's Story

Susan moved from one Peabody flat to another during COVID. She was told to hand the keys to her old flat to the Peabody inspector when they came to check the new one. The inspector came, took the keys, and confirmed receipt by email. But Peabody's system recorded the old tenancy as still running and arrears letters started arriving.

Susan called to explain. Nobody responded. She emailed. No reply. She called again and was told the relevant person was unavailable. Every month a new letter arrived, sometimes three or four at a time, each for a different amount. When she finally reached someone, she was told an email would be sent to the right people. At the end of the next month, another letter arrived.

She raised a complaint. It was acknowledged. Three months later she chased for an update and was told the complaint had been closed. Nobody had told her, and she had never received a response. When a Stage 1 response eventually arrived, four months late, it was a summary of the problem and a direction to contact yet another team. It offered no remedy and no information about how to escalate.

Susan told Peabody she wanted to take her complaint to the Ombudsman. Peabody told her it believed the complaint was already resolved. She asked for escalation. It referred her back to the same response. The Stage 2 response, when it finally arrived nine months later, confused Susan's complaint with a completely different complaint she had made about the condition of her new flat. Peabody used the compensation already paid for the earlier problem as justification for refusing compensation on this one. When Susan pointed out the mistake, Peabody offered an additional £75 and considered the matter closed.

The Ombudsman found maladministration on the rent accounts, maladministration on allegations of bullying and harassment by staff that Peabody never investigated, and severe maladministration on complaint handling. It ordered £1,850 in compensation. The complaint process that should have caught and corrected the original error had instead made it worse.

What the wider data shows: complaint handling

Susan's experience formed part of the most frequently examined issue in the dataset: Peabody's handling of residents' complaints. Across the 545 retrieved decisions:

• Decisions: Complaint handling appeared in 458 decisions, or 84.0% of the dataset.
• Findings: The Ombudsman made 471 complaint-handling findings, representing 37.0% of all 1,273 findings.
• Adverse findings: Of those 471 findings, 249 were findings of maladministration or severe maladministration, an adverse rate of 52.9%.
• Severe maladministration: Eleven complaint-handling findings were classified as severe maladministration.

Complaint handling was therefore Peabody's most pervasive problem in the dataset. In another 210 complaint-handling findings, the Ombudsman concluded that Peabody had provided reasonable redress after something had gone wrong. Reasonable redress is not counted as an adverse finding in the figures above.

Peabody's own 2025-26 Tenant Satisfaction Measures point in the same direction. Only 23.7% of surveyed residents who had made a complaint during the previous 12 months said they were satisfied with how it had been handled. Among shared owners, satisfaction was 12.4%. Those survey figures cover the wider Peabody Group and cannot be combined directly with the Ombudsman data, but they provide important context for the pattern found in the decisions.

Conclusion

This article covers published Ombudsman decisions only. It does not include complaints resolved by Peabody internally, complaints withdrawn before determination, or the experience of the many residents who never complained at all. The figures describe finding rows within published decisions, not individual households. Categories overlap: a single decision can and often does contain findings in more than one category, so the category totals cannot be added together.

The Ombudsman's institutional language can obscure what its findings describe. "Severe maladministration" meant a pregnant woman being moved repeatedly while raw sewage entered her home. It meant a disabled resident left frightened in her own flat without a recorded risk assessment. It meant a tenant pursued over arrears created by Peabody's own records, only for the complaints process to compound the original error.

These three cases were selected because they expose the human consequences of failures in different services. They are not representative of the severity of every determination. But the wider figures show that the service areas in which they occurred were not isolated: adverse findings were made in 69.1% of the repair-related findings, 69.1% of the ASB findings and 52.9% of the complaint-handling findings in the retrieved dataset.

Peabody says it has changed the way it handles complaints and learns from failures. The next question is whether later Ombudsman decisions show that those changes reached residents. That will be the subject of our next analysis.