The Property Ombudsman has sent a clear signal that she wants her organisation to be the only ombudsman in the private housing sector.

Katrine Sporle’s comments, made at NAEA Propertymark’s annual conference in London yesterday, came after the Government announced last month that it was launching a consultation on the way in which it handles redress in the property market.

Sporle said: “We have put in a huge amount of work over the past 12 months to position ourselves.

“We will be putting all of these things out there in the next few months because frankly we want to put our money where our mouth is and we want to say that we should be the single ombudsman for the sector.

“We are clear that a single ombudsman is the right answer.

“We are clear that a single ombudsman for the private sector is a better answer than one housing ombudsman for the entire social and private sector.”

One of the two other approved redress schemes, Ombudsman Services: Property, announced at the start of February that it would stage a managed withdrawal from the property market, saying it no longer wanted to officiate arbitration services as a “broken solution to a broken market”.

However, RICS-backed Ombudsman Services said it will come back into the housing and property market “as quickly as we can – once we feel that action is being taken to make the system for redress less confusing and more transparent.”

The third service is the Property Redress Scheme, launched when the Government said it wanted more choice in the market.

Speaking yesterday, Sporle added that the TPO, which is the de facto redress scheme for nearly all NAEA and ARLA members, was making a series of changes and modernisations to enhance its claim to become the single ombudsman and that it would be informing agents about over the coming months.

This will include helping agents to ensure that they inform consumers about how to deal with complaints much earlier in the process.

Sporle said: “When we do our consumer surveys and we ask them about how they were told about how to complain, only 10% of consumers say they were ever told by their agent about how to complain if things go wrong and certainly about the existence of an ombudsman.

“The Government wants you to tell people upfront about what to do when things go wrong, not to leave it until they go wrong and we want to help you to that.”

She also urged agents to work to speed up the handling of complaints.

She said: “You need to take this seriously.

“It isn’t acceptable any more for me to say to Government that it takes anything up to four to six months to deal with a complex enquiry or complex complaint.”

To underpin this, TPO will be offering “inexpensive” training for front-line staff, more details of which will be released at its conference on June 13.

Sporle also urged agents to engage with the Government’s consultation on housing redress.

She said: “You need to go and have a look at it, you need to read it and you need to respond to it.

“The reason you need to do that is because it continues to talk about the broken housing market and continues to give an insight into the fact that Government is really very concerned about what are the answers to regulation.”