How to make a complaint
Our complaints procedure sets out our process for dealing with complaints. You should only use our complaints procedure to complain about an interaction with us.
If you have a complaint, you should contact the service involved for an informal discussion first. The service is best placed to understand and resolve your complaint.
If this approach fails to resolve your issue satisfactorily, you can make a formal complaint.
To make a formal complaint, you will need:
- your name, address and contact details
- the location or site where the issue happened
- all relevant dates
- the names of any of our staff or contractors who were involved
- where and how our service failed to meet your expectations
- what you would like us to do to put things right
When you should not use our complaints process
You should not use our official complaints process if your complaint is:
- an issue where we can give an immediate response, such as revisiting your property to empty a missed bin
- about a third party (where you want to complain about someone else, not connected with the council, such as a neighbour)
- a routine request for services such as reporting a noisy neighbours, reporting a planning breach, reporting a parking issue or enquiring about grass cutting (unless you think we have not dealt with the initial request properly or to our service standard)
- about an issue that already has an existing rights of appeal process, such as refusal of planning permission, parking fine or housing benefit assessment
- an allegation of fraud, wrongdoing or malpractice, which we deal with through our whistleblowing policy
- about a Councillor (we have a specific procedure to deal with complaints about Councillors)