A north London council — Camden Council — has indeed paid out nearly £2,000 to a resident with arthritis after contractors left him without heating for almost eight months.
Contractors responding to a leaking radiator didn’t just fix it — they ripped it out and blocked the heating supply to the entire property, leaving the man with no heating from February to October 2025.
He reported the issue five times, but Camden only met its own emergency repair standard once — despite its policy requiring an engineer by 8 pm the same day for heating failures.
Two repair appointments in May were booked… then cancelled with no notice. The council didn’t acknowledge the incomplete repairs until he filed a formal complaint in September.
He resorted to costly electric heaters, which still didn’t warm the home properly — a serious issue for someone with arthritis.
The Housing Ombudsman ruled maladministration, saying Camden failed to consider his need for alternative heating and repeatedly offered insufficient compensation.
Camden’s eight‑month heating fiasco boiled down to this: £1,852.65 for a man left shivering with arthritis — covering loss of heating, extra energy costs, missed appointments, time and trouble, and poor complaint handling.
The Ombudsman’s view was blunt: every payment Camden offered was too little and too late, because each one either fell short of what the tenant was entitled to under the council’s own policy or failed to reflect the “seriousness and duration” of eight months without heating.
Although Camden tried to patch things over with piecemeal offers, none of them matched the scale of its repeated failures — which is exactly why the Ombudsman stepped in and ordered proper redress.
The watchdog didn’t mince its words: it rebuked Camden for a clear service failure in the way it handled the resident’s complaints during what it called a “prolonged” period of disrepair — eight months of no heating, repeated cancellations, and a complaint process that dragged on without meaningful action.
It wasn’t just the broken heating; it was the broken system around it. The Ombudsman found that Camden’s responses were slow, dismissive, and failed to recognise the seriousness of the situation, especially given the resident’s arthritis. In other words, the council didn’t just mishandle the repair — it mishandled the person.
Camden’s failures didn’t stop at the broken heating — the watchdog found the council repeatedly broke its own complaints policy by failing to give the resident a complete response more than once, and by not even keeping proper records of the repairs carried out or the compensation already paid. That lack of basic record‑keeping caused the resident “frustration and inconvenience” on top of everything else.
In short, the Ombudsman said Camden didn’t just mishandle the repair — it mishandled the paperwork, the communication, and the process meant to protect the resident during a prolonged period of disrepair.
In the end, the Ombudsman ordered Camden to pay £1,852.65, a single sum that wrapped together the loss of heating, the resident’s extra energy costs, the time and trouble the saga caused, the missed appointments, and the council’s failures in handling his complaint — a full bill for eight months of avoidable disrepair and poor service.
What happened in Camden isn’t some isolated blunder. Across London, councils are repeatedly being pulled up for long delays, poor record‑keeping, missed appointments, and complaint handling that leaves residents chasing answers for months.
The Ombudsman’s reports show the same issues cropping up in Hackney, Haringey, Brent, Southwark, Lambeth, Newham, and Westminster — not just Camden. It’s a London‑wide pattern of under‑resourced repairs teams, poor contractor oversight, and councils failing to follow their own rules.
And you can see how it happens: London’s housing stock is old, repairs teams are stretched, contractors are inconsistent, and councils often don’t keep proper records. When something goes wrong, it spirals — and residents end up stuck in months‑long sagas that should have been fixed in a day.
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 