Customer complaints

You can register a formal complaint to us about council services.

Before you submit a formal complaint

Contact us before you make a complaint

Many complaints can be resolved by speaking to the member of staff who dealt with you in the first place. We would encourage you to do this, as it might put matters right quickly.

If such an approach does not resolve your complaint, or if you are unhappy with our response, you can complain formally.

What counts as a complaint

We have adopted the Housing Ombudsman Service's definition of a complaint:

An expression of dissatisfaction, however made, about the standard of service, actions or lack of action by the council, its own staff, or those acting on its behalf, affecting and individual resident or group of residents.

What does not count as a complaint

A complaint is not any of the following:

Who can complain

Any resident, tenant or user of services provided by us. Alternatively, you may:

  • represent an organisation
  • be an advocate for a service user affected by how we provided our services

Time limit

We expect complaints to be made in a timely manner. We will not consider complaints in respect of a matter that is more than 12 months old, except in exceptional circumstances.

Complaints about councillors

If you have a complaint about one of your local councillors, it will be dealt with under a separate procedure by our monitoring officer. Find out more about the councillors' code of conduct.

Complaints about housing services

The Housing Ombudsman website published its Complaint Handling Code in July 2020. The code outlines what you can and should expect from us as your council. This includes annually self-assessing our performance against the code as your landlord. We assess our complaint procedure in May each year.

If you are a tenant or leaseholder in council housing and your complaint concerns a property, we will aim to provide you with a full response at stage 1 within 10 working days of your complaint being logged.