Vexatious – The Collective Defensive Noun
Introduction
I receive, on average, between 15 and 20 complaints per week relating to multiple housing associations. This will be my tenth year of supporting residents as best as I can. It did not start at that volume — the early years were much quieter — but even taking that into account, I have spoken to and supported at least 5,000 residents over the past decade.
That experience has given me insight into how residents communicate. Complaints range from meticulously factual to deeply emotive. They can be inflammatory, overzealous, poorly written, long-winded, or lacking in substance. I understand this.
I am not claiming to understand it to the same degree as someone on the real front line — such as a housing officer or a customer service agent — but I do understand that there is a great deal of noise in the system.
When someone comes to me for help, the first question I ask is simple: have they contacted their housing association first? Every housing association must be given the time and opportunity — as is their right — to fix issues before external escalation takes place.
Having been pursued through the courts myself, I am acutely aware of the importance of accuracy. If I am going to publish something, it must be factual and truthful.
For that reason, I ask to see correspondence between the resident and the housing association. I review timelines and evidence. If there is a legitimate basis to escalate, I agree to support them, usually with permission for direct engagement with the landlord. I work to understand all sides of the story.
“Both sides” often implies a resident and a housing association, but in reality there are usually multiple agencies and, almost certainly, multiple residents involved. It is important to consider all of that.
I say this because I recognise that not every complaint is well-founded. There are cases where anger or frustration outweighs substance — even if there is a kernel of truth at the centre. It might involve disputes with neighbours, relocation requests, or compensation claims.
In many cases, concerns are valid. In some, they are not. I cannot give examples, as that would betray trust. I have liaised with multiple housing associations in such situations and would gladly acknowledge good practice where it exists. However, to protect confidentiality between myself, residents, and staff, I cannot do so.
One day, perhaps, that will change. The housing sector should platform best practice and celebrate when things go right. It should be open, transparent, and honest. Alas, that cannot happen, as doing so would require housing associations to admit that many of the issues presented to them cannot be fixed. If they could fix them, they would have already.
There are residents who want homes that simply do not exist — a three-storey townhouse, private parking, a garage, a leafy suburb — all on a Housing Benefit budget. That is not achievable.
There are also compensation claims reaching into many hundreds of thousands of pounds for losses that do not justify those figures. Once a number becomes fixed in someone’s mind, the housing association becomes the enemy. Everything becomes wrongdoing. The aim becomes escalation at all costs.
I understand that some residents will never be satisfied. Some are pursuing validation, financial gain, relocation, or the removal of neighbours.
But this blog is about something else.
This blog is about what happens when housing associations take recognised legal definitions of “vexatious” behaviour and use them to shift blame onto the person raising the issue — to blame the complainant instead of addressing the complaint.
Through a Subject Access Request, GreenSquareAccord — my own landlord, with whom I have a long and combative history — was found to have published internally that I was a “vexatious customer.” using false claims. I will return to that relationship later. For now, the fundamental question is this: what do housing associations actually mean when they describe someone as vexatious, and what is the true definition of the term?
What does “vexatious” actually mean?
The word “vexatious” originates from the Latin vexare, meaning to annoy, harass, or disturb. In modern usage, it has a specific and narrow meaning, particularly in legal and administrative contexts.
In law, a vexatious action is not simply one that is persistent or inconvenient. It refers to conduct that is deliberately abusive, malicious, or without reasonable grounds, and which is pursued primarily to harass, delay, or burden the other party rather than to resolve a legitimate issue.
In England and Wales, the concept most commonly appears in two areas:
Vexatious litigation, where a person repeatedly brings claims that are wholly without merit
Vexatious requests, particularly under Freedom of Information law
In both cases, the threshold is intentionally high. A request or complaint does not become vexatious simply because it is:
Repeated
Time-consuming
Complex
Strongly worded
Escalated after earlier failure
Regulatory and legal guidance consistently emphasise that a matter can only be described as vexatious when it lacks substance, is pursued in bad faith, and shows no genuine intent to resolve an issue. Even then, the label should be applied cautiously, proportionately, and on the basis of evidence.
What the term was never meant to be is a behavioural shortcut — a way of dismissing someone because they are inconvenient, articulate, persistent, or unwilling to accept inadequate responses.
This distinction matters. Once the word “vexatious” is applied, it stops being a description of conduct and becomes a judgement of character. And that is where its misuse becomes dangerous.
The housing association world — the world of housing — is a very small, incestuous pond. People who are unable to promote upwards often move sideways or diagonally into other associations. There are countless corporate events where the same people mix and mingle. We all know this.
More worryingly, training and “best practice” are increasingly handled by fewer and fewer external agencies. Those agencies move in the same ponds, too, because, as I have pointed out previously, you have to play the game to get past procurement. That means being willing to play nicely, support the narrative, attend events, and remain on good terms if you want to stay on housing associations’ payrolls and profit from organisations that describe themselves as not-for-profit.
And of course, sitting at the centre of this ecosystem is the Chartered Institute of Housing, often presented as a bastion of training, professionalism, and good practice. However, as we know, with everyone dipping their toes into the same small ponds, the meaning of “vexatious” has shifted. It has stopped being a precise term and has become something else entirely — a catch-all label for anyone who dares to speak out about bad practice. In that environment, the word loses its true meaning.
The Chartered Institute of Housing’s own guidance states that complaint handling is not simply about process but about culture, values and behaviour. It emphasises that the way an organisation responds to challenge reflects its leadership and integrity, not just its procedures. If complaints are genuinely viewed as opportunities to learn and improve, then persistence should not trigger containment strategies — it should prompt reflection.
The same guidance advises against the use of negative labels that categorise or “other” individuals. That principle sits uneasily alongside the growing reliance on terms such as “vexatious” when complaints become uncomfortable. When sector standards warn against language that alienates, yet such language continues to be used, the issue is no longer procedural — it becomes cultural.
In a sector this tightly interconnected, language travels fast. Terminology is shared, recycled, and reinforced through training sessions, conferences, guidance notes, informal conversations, and internal messaging. What begins as a narrowly defined legal concept has, over time, become a cultural shorthand.
This matters because once a term like “vexatious” is normalised within that shared culture, it no longer requires rigorous definition or evidence to be deployed. It becomes understood, implicitly, as a way of describing a type of person rather than a specific type of conduct.
The risk here is obvious. When staff move between organisations, they carry not only policies and procedures with them, but attitudes and assumptions. When training providers rely on housing associations for income, there is little incentive to challenge how those associations frame residents. When professional bodies set the tone but rarely interrogate how language is used in practice, harmful shortcuts go unexamined.
In that context, “vexatious” stops meaning malicious, abusive, or bad-faith behaviour. Instead, it starts to mean persistent. It starts to mean articulate. It starts to mean unwilling to go away.
And because this reframing happens quietly — through shared culture rather than written policy — it becomes difficult to challenge. The word sounds official. It sounds justified. It sounds like best practice. But in reality, it is often nothing more than a defensive reflex, reinforced by a sector that speaks largely to itself.
That is how a legal safeguard turns into a silencing mechanism.
Independent guidance makes clear that the threshold for describing someone as “vexatious” is deliberately high. The Information Commissioner’s Office, in its Section 50 guidance, stresses that a complaint is not vexatious simply because it is persistent, inconvenient, strongly worded, or escalated. Motive cannot be assumed from tone. Bad faith must be evidenced. Even where behaviour is challenging, any restriction must be proportionate, evidenced, and subject to review. Crucially, guidance emphasises that the focus should remain on conduct in context — not on labelling the individual.
Against that standard, the casual and internalised use of the term within housing becomes far more troubling. If regulatory bodies require a high evidential threshold before restricting a complainant, why is the word so readily deployed in internal briefings and complaint responses without that same discipline? If that is the standard regulators apply, it should also be the standard housing associations apply to themselves.
Vexatious in Play
When I first started supporting other residents, I began to notice a pattern.
As I have already set out, I operate a filtering process. Residents are asked to provide evidence. Correspondence is reviewed. Timelines are checked. I do not get involved unless I am satisfied that the case is valid, proportionate, and grounded in fact. In reality, in the vast majority of cases — nine times out of ten — it is.
Again, it is important to be fair. Most housing associations do respond correctly. Many attempt to follow their internal processes. And it must be acknowledged that housing associations cannot fix everything. A great deal of what they are dealing with has been inherited — from historic disrepair, legacy contracts, underfunded stock, and policy decisions made long before current leadership teams were in place.
However, alongside this, I began to see a growing number of cases where the pushback was no longer about resolving the issue being raised, but about reframing the person raising it.
That shift became unmistakable when I published a guest blog by Lindsay Bush on the Housing Sector website, detailing the experience of Victor Jackson, an 83-year-old blind tenant, and his interactions with Leeds Jewish Housing Association.
As with all Housing Sector reporting, a full right to reply was offered in advance of publication. What followed was not a refusal to engage, nor silence — but a request to move the discussion off email and into a private conversation. Mark Grandfield, the Chief Executive, asked for a call, explaining that the association’s relationship with Lindsay was “extremely complex” and not easily captured in writing. I agreed to that conversation.
What struck me during that call — and in the subsequent written response — was not defensiveness in itself. Housing providers are entitled to dispute criticism. What stood out was the framing. Responsibility for the situation was repeatedly placed back onto Lindsay and Victor. Their persistence, their refusal to accept outcomes they disagreed with, and their continued challenge were presented as the core problem.
Throughout that discussion, the language used was familiar. This was not framed as a disagreement over facts alone. It was framed as behaviour. As campaigning. As something unreasonable. As something vexatious.
At one point during the conversation, I challenged this directly. I said to Mark that this was exactly the language I was seeing more and more often behind closed doors across the sector — not necessarily written down in formal policy, but spoken, shared, and understood. The word “vexatious” was doing heavy lifting. It was no longer describing a narrow category of malicious conduct; it was being used to explain away continued scrutiny.
This was not about one email, one blog, or one tenant. It was about mindset.
What made this exchange particularly important was that it was not adversarial. There was no shouting, no hostility, and no refusal to engage. It was calm, professional, and candid. And yet the conclusion was the same one I have seen elsewhere: the problem was not the unresolved issues, the legal missteps, or the procedural failures — it was the people who would not let them go.
That is when it became clear to me that the use of “vexatious” in housing is not accidental. It is not isolated. It is part of a shared internal language that allows organisations under pressure to reverse the focus — away from performance and onto the person challenging it.
I know this because I have seen it again and again.
And I know it because I have experienced it myself — including in conversations involving senior leadership and external third parties at GreenSquareAccord, where the same framing has been applied to me.
When “Vexatious” Moves From Conversation to Record
The clearest example of how “vexatious” thinking becomes embedded within an organisation can be found not in internal conversations, but in formal complaint responses and recorded actions.
In my case, this crystallised at Stage 2 of GreenSquareAccord’s complaints process. This response, signed off by a Director of Quality and Compliance, represents the organisation’s final position. It is not informal commentary. It is the official, recorded account of how the organisation understands my conduct, my complaint, and its own actions.
On the surface, the document presents itself as balanced. One element of my complaint — ongoing communication failures — is upheld. A £50 payment is offered in line with Housing Ombudsman guidance. Everything else is rejected. But it is how those rejections are framed that matters.
Throughout the response, the focus repeatedly shifts away from the substance of the issues raised — including misuse of legal processes, narrative control, police involvement, and sector exclusion — and onto my behaviour, tone, and perceived impact on staff wellbeing.
Legal escalation is described as being “led by concerns for colleague wellbeing”. Allegations are referenced in broad terms. My conduct is characterised as persistent and focused on individuals. Restrictions on communication are reframed not simply as administrative controls, but as protective measures for staff. Breaches to undertakings were presented in court, with no legal merit.
The context behind those assertions is important.
During the period in which contact management arrangements were being put together, a meeting took place under the justification of safety and wellbeing. It was during this period that allegations emerged suggesting that I had behaved in a threatening, disturbing, or “creepy” manner towards “junior female members of the team”. - See for more information, and my response.
I asked for evidence. None was provided.
Across multiple contact management plan letters, and despite repeated written requests, no evidence has ever been disclosed to substantiate those claims.
Within those arrangements, staff were advised that if they felt harassed or threatened, they should contact the police. No individual came forward publicly to say that they had been harassed. No complainant presented evidence. Nevertheless, Steve Hayes made a report to the police.
As a result of that report, I was arrested at home at 1am on a Sunday morning by six police officers. I was taken into custody, interviewed, and later released on bail. My mobile phone was seized and retained for approximately one week.
The investigation concluded with no further action. No charges were brought. No evidence was produced to support the allegations that had triggered the arrest.
Despite numerous requests — through complaint correspondence, through contact management challenges, and now through referrals to both the Housing Ombudsman and the Information Commissioner’s Office — not a single piece of evidence has been disclosed that substantiates claims of harassment, threat, or vexatious misconduct.
The sequence is stark: internal allegations without evidence, escalation to police, arrest, seizure of property, and eventual no further action.
Within the Stage 2 complaint response, the emphasis remains on wellbeing, impact, and tone. Social media activity is scrutinised not primarily for factual inaccuracy, but for delivery and repetition. Criticism of leadership is reframed as personal attack. Persistence is recast as fixation. Escalation becomes misconduct.
The most telling aspect of the response is not what it proves, but what it assumes. It assumes that the organisation’s interpretation of intent carries greater weight than the absence of evidence. It assumes that continued challenge, even where no wrongdoing has been established, is itself unreasonable. And it assumes that once behaviour is problematised, the substance of the complaint can be displaced.
Even within court proceedings, the pattern centred not on demonstrable harm, but on reputational control. I was asked to remove all references to Ruth Cooke, the Chief Executive of GreenSquareAccord, from online commentary — including posts and hashtags. In open court, the judge questioned that position, asking, in substance, whether the Chief Executive of a housing association is somehow immune from criticism being posted about her online.
This is how “vexatious” operates in practice.
Not as a narrowly defined legal threshold, carefully evidenced and proportionately applied, but as a framing device. A mechanism through which organisations move from answering questions to managing the questioner. From addressing complaints to controlling narrative.
It is presented as protection — of staff, of wellbeing, of reputation. But the outcome is the same: the original issues are displaced, and the complainant becomes the risk.
This is not an abstract theory. It is documented in complaint responses, reflected in internal processes, tested in court, and resolved by police with no evidence found.
And once the label is applied, the path back to neutral ground becomes almost impossible.
From Internal Narrative to Public Dismissal
What makes the Stage 2 response particularly important is not just how GreenSquareAccord frames concerns internally, but how that framing later appears — diluted, informal, and far more revealing — in the public domain.
Alongside the formal complaints process, senior and operational staff at GreenSquareAccord were active on LinkedIn, promoting their work, appearing on panels, speaking about “authentic customer engagement,” and positioning the organisation as resident-focused and values-led. At the same time, commentary appeared that singled me out personally, questioning my motives and suggesting I wanted to be famous or simply had “too much time on my hands.”
Sukhi Sidhu, Gas Manager at GreenSquareAccord, publicly suggested that criticism was coming from someone who “seems to have too much free time or desperately wants to be famous.” This was said while he himself was appearing on local radio and participating in public-facing radio promotion of GreenSquareAccord services. It was also during a period when serious concerns were being raised about gas safety compliance, historic record-keeping, and the legacy of homes left potentially unsafe. Better-qualified Gas Managers had left prior to his appointment, against a backdrop of long-running gas safety issues. At the same time, residents were reporting cases of no heating and no hot water.
The contradiction is stark.
Steve Hayes, meanwhile, publicly positioned himself as the victim of online harassment. He suggested that content had been successfully taken down and then re-posted by me. That is not accurate. None of his complaints to YouTube, X, Facebook, or LinkedIn were upheld. No content was removed for breaching platform policies. No findings were made against me. The material remained because it complied with the rules of those platforms. The narrative of repeated removal and reposting simply does not reflect what happened.
Yet the public messaging framed him as the target of bullying and misconduct.
At the same time, he appeared at sector events speaking about authentic customer engagement and communications leadership. He took centre stage at awards ceremonies and corporate gatherings, including so-called “Gold Star” events — all funded from the same organisational budgets that residents ultimately pay into through rent and service charges. The optics are difficult to ignore: public celebration, professional recognition, and reputational positioning, while residents raising concerns are characterised as obsessive or self-promoting.
Internally, actions are justified as protective. Contact restrictions, legal escalation, and police involvement are framed as safeguarding colleague wellbeing. Behaviour is problematised. Language is scrutinised. Intent is inferred. Mid-level management brief staff — some of whom are unaware of the full context — that what is happening amounts to a “hate group” directed at the organisation. In one case, an internal email later described as “ill-chosen but not constituting bullying or harassment” was sent by “a colleague below managerial level.”
Externally, on LinkedIn, that caution disappears.
Comments are made casually. Complex disputes are reduced to personality assessments. Persistence becomes ego. Scrutiny becomes attention-seeking. The individual raising concerns becomes a caricature rather than a complainant.
What is particularly telling is that this public commentary mirrors the internal framing, but without the safeguards of process or evidence. The same assumptions appear — that scrutiny is unreasonable, that challenge is personal, that persistence must have ulterior motives — only stripped of formal language and presented as common sense.
This is how “vexatious” thinking becomes socially reinforced.
It no longer needs to be written into policy or explicitly stated in a complaint response. It becomes a shared understanding, signalled through tone, dismissive remarks, professional back-patting, and reputational positioning. Once established, it travels quickly — not just within one organisation, but across the sector.
It is also important to note who is amplified and who is isolated.
Senior leaders and communications figures are able to appear publicly, shape the narrative, and speak about values and authenticity. Meanwhile, criticism is reframed as harmful behaviour. The organisation’s voice is amplified; the resident’s voice is reduced to a risk to be managed.
This is not about one LinkedIn comment, one radio appearance, or one awards ceremony.
It is about what those moments reveal: that once a resident is framed internally as “difficult,” “unreasonable,” or “vexatious,” that framing does not remain behind closed doors. It seeps into public discourse, shaping how others in the sector perceive and respond to them — often before engaging with the substance of what is being raised.
And once that happens, the ground shifts.
The debate is no longer about service failures, governance, safety, or accountability. It becomes about personality. Motive. Tone. Time.
And that is precisely the point at which meaningful scrutiny becomes easiest to dismiss.
Executive Endorsement and Sector Optics
What elevates this beyond routine LinkedIn noise is the level of executive endorsement.
Sophie Atkinson, Executive Director of Governance at GreenSquareAccord and a qualified lawyer, publicly stated that the organisation “100% support Steve Hayes” and would not use corporate platforms to amplify what she described as bullying and harassment. She attached the hashtag #westandwithSteve.
This is not a junior colleague commenting emotionally. This is the organisation’s Head of Governance — a legally trained senior executive — making a public characterisation of the situation.
No platform upheld complaints against the content cited. No formal findings of harassment were made. Yet the public framing presented it as repeated “clear infringements,” reinforcing a narrative of wrongdoing that had not been substantiated.
At the same time, Steve Hayes continued to appear publicly as a sector-facing communications figure — hosting events, judging awards, running webinars, and positioning himself as a leader in stakeholder engagement.
The optics are stark.
Executive governance leadership publicly endorses a narrative of bullying. Sector peers rally behind it. Professional solidarity is visible and vocal. Meanwhile, the underlying issues that prompted the scrutiny remain largely undiscussed.
That is not accidental.
Despite GreenSquareAccord publicly maintaining that they did not approach third parties to spread allegations about me, the record tells a different story.
ITV contacted GreenSquareAccord for a right of reply. That is normal journalistic process. The BBC also sought comment in the same way. However, ITV later indicated that they were taken aback by the nature of Steve Hayes’s response. Rather than a measured corporate reply, it was described as personal in tone and unusually aggressive, including an email sent at around 1 a.m. That is not standard communications practice. It suggests something far more defensive than routine media engagement.
The situation with the Chartered Institute of Housing, Four Million Homes, and other sector platforms was entirely different. They did not approach GreenSquareAccord. I had been invited to speak and publicly announced as appearing. Only after those announcements did Steve Hayes contact those organisations directly to challenge my involvement and seek my removal. That was not a right of reply. It was a proactive intervention designed to exclude me from sector discussion.
It is particularly striking given that Steve Hayes previously worked at the Chartered Institute of Housing — an organisation whose own published guidance makes clear that labels such as “vexatious” must be used sparingly, proportionately, and only where behaviour, not challenge itself, justifies it. That guidance explicitly warns against defensive or reputationally driven responses to persistent complaints. Highlighting again how published standards speak of proportionality and restraint; actual behaviour revealed defensiveness and reputational protection.
Yet the conduct that followed — the outreach to sector bodies, the framing of my actions as harassment, and the rapid normalisation of the vexatious narrative — ran directly counter to those principles. The gap between the sector’s stated standards and the behaviour displayed in practice could not be clearer.
This distinction matters. In Clift v Slough Borough Council, the Court of Appeal confirmed that labelling someone in a way that damages their reputation — particularly in a public or professional context — can amount to unlawful defamation where it is disproportionate or unsupported by evidence. Sophie Atkinson, Head of Governance and a qualified lawyer, should be well aware of that legal precedent. Yet GreenSquareAccord’s Stage 2 complaint response denies any inappropriate third-party engagement, framing all external contact as routine right-of-reply activity.
The evidence shows otherwise. ITV and the BBC sought comment as part of journalism. The Chartered Institute of Housing and Four Million Homes did not. They were contacted after I was announced, not before publication of any story. To present those interventions as simple rights of reply is misleading. It obscures the fact that GreenSquareAccord moved beyond reactive media engagement into active efforts to shape who was permitted to speak — and how I was perceived — across the sector.
A Toxic Relationship
It is important to understand the nature of the relationship between residents and housing associations — because without that context, the behaviour that follows can be misunderstood or minimised.
Housing associations often describe residents as “customers”. The language implies choice, agency, and the ability to walk away. In reality, none of those things apply.
Residents cannot simply take their business elsewhere. There is no meaningful consumer choice. Moving is often impossible — financially, practically, or emotionally. Complaints processes are slow, internal, and tightly controlled by the very organisations being complained about. External routes to justice are complex, intimidating, and time-consuming. Even when findings are made, enforcement is limited.
Charges continue to rise. Service charges are demanded regardless of dispute. Legal action can be taken swiftly by the landlord, while residents wait months or years for resolution. Power is asymmetric and constant.
When a relationship has this level of imbalance — where one party controls the home, the records, the processes, and the consequences — it carries responsibility. When that responsibility is not exercised with care, accountability, and humility, the relationship becomes unhealthy.
In many cases, it becomes toxic.
A toxic relationship is not defined by shouting or overt hostility. It is defined by control, dependency, deflection, and the erosion of trust. It is characterised by the sidelining of concerns, the minimisation of harm, and the reframing of legitimate challenge as unacceptable behaviour.
That is where many residents now find themselves.
They are told to engage, but punished when they persist. Told to complain, but labelled when they escalate. Told they are valued, but treated as a risk once they refuse to be quiet.
This is the environment in which DARVO appears — not as an abstract theory, but as a lived experience.
DARVO stands for Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. It is a recognised pattern most commonly identified in abusive relationships, institutional abuse, and bullying dynamics. It describes what happens when power is challenged and accountability is resisted.
First, the issue is denied or minimised. The focus shifts away from substance and towards process, complexity, or misunderstanding.
Next, the person raising the concern is attacked — not always overtly, but through questioning their tone, motives, persistence, or character.
Finally, the roles are reversed. The organisation presents itself as the victim — under attack, under pressure, harmed — while the person who raised the issue becomes the offender.
This is not about intent. It is about behaviour.
When housing associations adopt this pattern, consciously or otherwise, they are not merely managing complaints. They are replicating dynamics seen in coercive and abusive environments — environments where power is used to silence, discredit, and exhaust.
That comparison may be uncomfortable. It should be. Because housing associations are not neutral service providers. They are custodians of people’s homes. They operate in spaces where vulnerability is common, dependency is real, and the consequences of failure are profound.
Using the same behavioural patterns seen in abusive relationships — denial, attack, and reversal — is not neutral. It is a failure of governance, culture, and accountability.
And once that pattern is recognised, it becomes impossible to unsee.
Because “vexatious” is no longer just a word. It becomes the mechanism by which this toxic dynamic is justified, normalised, and repeated.
A Final Juxtaposition
On the one hand, this blog has set out how residents who persist, escalate, or refuse to go away are increasingly reframed as vexatious, and how behaviours consistent with DARVO are used to deflect scrutiny and reverse blame.
On the other hand, the Housing Ombudsman has recently published formal guidance on apologies — setting out how housing providers should say sorry when they get things wrong, why apologies matter, and what a meaningful apology looks like.
That juxtaposition matters.
Housing associations publicly promote mantras about putting customers at the heart of everything they do. Yet the Ombudsman now finds it necessary to instruct landlords on how to apologise at all. That alone tells its own story.
The guidance does not introduce a new idea. Apologising for failure is not radical; most of us learned it in the playground. It is basic accountability. The fact it now requires formal instruction highlights just how far behaviour has drifted from the sector’s own rhetoric.
While housing providers are being told — by their regulator — how to say sorry, residents raising those failures are being labelled, managed, restricted, and reframed as the problem.
That contrast exposes the disconnect at the heart of the system: the published values versus the lived experience, the PR versus the practice, the language of customer focus versus the reality of defensiveness.
The Housing Ombudsman should not have to remind housing associations how to take responsibility. That it does speaks volumes — and it sits uncomfortably alongside the growing use of “vexatious” and DARVO-style responses to legitimate challenge.
Conclusion
This is bigger than one landlord, one resident, or one dispute.
When the word “vexatious” is used loosely, it does more than describe behaviour — it reshapes power. It moves scrutiny away from institutions and onto individuals. It turns complaints into character flaws. It makes persistence suspicious.
That shift is not accidental. It protects systems under pressure. It protects reputations. But it erodes trust.
Residents are not perfect. Housing associations are not villains. But language must be precise, proportionate, and grounded in evidence. Once labels replace facts, accountability collapses.
The sector cannot continue to promote customer focus publicly while managing dissent privately through reframing and reputational control. That contradiction is now too visible.
“Vexatious” should be a high threshold, carefully applied in rare circumstances. It should never become shorthand for “inconvenient”.
If the sector wants to rebuild trust, it starts with something simple: say sorry when you are wrong, answer when you are challenged, and reserve powerful labels for situations that genuinely meet the definition.
Anything less is strategy, not accountability.
The question now is simple: will housing associations be brave enough to admit when they are wrong and apologise — not as a PR exercise, but because it is right and because the Housing Ombudsman has made clear that accountability requires it? Or will senior leaders continue to manage criticism through labels and narrative control, despite knowing — particularly those with legal training — that reputational framing and the spread of unsubstantiated allegations can cross not just ethical lines, but legal ones too? This is no longer just about culture. It is about responsibility. The choice is theirs — but residents are no longer prepared to be dismissed.
Right of Reply
LJHA support the debate made in this article but strongly refute the vast majority of specific claims made against us in this case. We have been validated in this view by three First Tier Tribunals, as well as regulator and ombudsman investigations, which found those claims to be largely without merit, yet these claims continue to be repeated publicly.
GreenSquareAccord and Steve Hayes were also offered the opportunity to provide a statement prior to publication and chose not to respond.
Further Reading
The following documents informed this article and provide wider context on how complaints, “vexatious” classifications, and unreasonable behaviour should be handled:
– Hammersmith & Fulham Council, Unreasonable or Vexatious Behaviour Policy (November 2024) vexatious-or-unreasonable-behav…
– Harrison Housing Vexatious Complainant Policy v1.0 (December 2024)
– EPIC - Vexatious Complaints Policy
– Information Commissioner’s Office, Section 50(2)(c) Guide
– Chartered Institute of Housing, How to Handle Complaints Effectively
This debate is not abstract. The standards already exist — in published policies, regulatory guidance, and sector codes of conduct.