Key facts about complaints
‘The best authorities use complaints as a barometer of external opinion and as an early warning of problems might otherwise stay unseen. They take that a step further and use critical feedback to drive a sophisticated culture of learning, reflection and improvement.’ Local Government & Social Care Ombudsman
- We received 91 stage one complaints, of which 15 were not investigated because they were either withdrawn by the customer or were not about services provided by the council. This is a 33% increase on last year, when 57 complaints were investigated.
- Following investigation, 33 stage one complaints were either upheld or partially upheld. 43 complaints were not upheld. This is because, while the customer was not happy with the service they received, or the decision the council made, teams had delivered the services or decisions in line with policy, and poor practice or injustice was not found.
- Last year 22 stage one complaints were upheld or partially upheld, so this is a significant increase (50%). We issued 19 apologies this year, compared to 16 apologies last year.
- Sixteen stage-two complaints were handled. Five were upheld, three were partially upheld and eight were not upheld. In the previous year only four complaints progressed to stage two, and two of these were upheld or partially upheld, so this is a significant increase on the previous year.
- Waste (36%, 27), revenues and benefits and corporate debt (12%, 9), housing (11%, 8) planning (9%, 7) and planning enforcement (7%, 5) received the most complaints*.
- Whilst complaints about our joint waste service increased this year (27 in total with 19 upheld, relating mainly to missed bins, assisted collections and blue bag returns), when you consider the service carries out over 4,300,000 bin collections from 82,910 households a year, the number of complaints is still very low.
- Planning related complaints dropped slightly compared to last year, when 14% (8) of all complaints were planning related.
- 89% (68) of stage one complaints were responded to within the target timescales, which is a significant improvement on last year when 76% (43) of complaints met our target timescales. Where responses were not issued within 20 working days, customers were kept informed of progress.
- Stage two complaints were either responded to within the target timescale, or customers were kept updated if the investigation was going to take longer.
* In line with our complaint policy, where there has been a service failure which is easily rectified, e.g., a report of litter in a park, or a missed bin collection, these are not logged as complaints unless they become repeat issues, and the customer asks to log a complaint