UK Housing Ombudsman Decisions Watchdog

Watches the Housing Ombudsman Service's public Decisions Archive (housing-ombudsman.org.uk/decisions) — the official record of investigation findings against social landlords in England: local councils, housing associations and ALMOs (Arm's Length Management Organisations). Every decision states whether the Ombudsman found maladministration, severe maladministration, service failure or no maladministration, plus the full determination text and any orders/recommendations made to the landlord.

No login, no API key, no scraping tricks — this actor reads the same public HTML pages a visitor's browser would, respecting robots.txt (which explicitly allows this path).

What you get

One row per decision matching your filters:

Field	Description
case_ref	Housing Ombudsman case reference number
landlord	The landlord the decision was made against
landlord_type	e.g. "Local Authority / ALMO or TMO", "Housing Association"
decision_type	e.g. "Investigation"
occupancy	Tenure at the time, e.g. "Secure Tenancy"
decision_date	ISO date (YYYY-MM-DD) the decision was issued
decision_date_raw	The date as published, e.g. "28 August 2026"
maladministration_level	Parsed from the determination: "severe maladministration", "maladministration", "service failure", "no maladministration / reasonable redress", or null if not detected
determination	The Ombudsman's own "We found: ..." findings text
reasons	The "Summary of reasons" text
recommendations	Orders/recommendations made to the landlord
decision_url	Link to the full decision on housing-ombudsman.org.uk
watch_label	Your own tag, copied onto every row
status	ok, invalid_input, http_error, network_error or parse_error

Input

• Landlord name contains — free text matched against the landlord name (e.g. Clarion, London Borough of). Leave empty for all landlords.
• Decision date from / to — YYYY-MM-DD, filters on the decision's issue date. Needs "Fetch full detail" on.
• Fetch full detail for each case — when on (default), the actor also opens each decision's own page for landlord type, occupancy, decision type, date, the maladministration finding and the full determination/recommendations text (one extra request per row). Turn off for a faster, list-only run (landlord name + case reference + URL only).
• Label for this watch — a tag copied onto every row, useful when several scheduled watches share one dataset.
• Maximum decisions to return — stops paging once this many rows are collected (default 30, max 500).

Example uses

• Track every new maladministration finding against a specific landlord for a local newsroom, tenants' union or watchdog site.
• Feed a law firm's or claims handler's lead list for housing disrepair cases.
• Build a landlord accountability/compliance tracker for insurers or investors in social housing.

Notes

• Leave every filter empty to pull the newest decisions across all of England.
• The Decisions Archive lists newest first, 10 per page, with no server-side date filter — this actor pages through the archive and filters by date locally once "Fetch full detail" opens each decision page (the list page alone carries no date).
• This actor covers England (Housing Ombudsman Service jurisdiction) only. It does not cover the separate Scottish Public Services Ombudsman (see spso-decision-watchdog) or the Public Services Ombudsman for Wales.