Feedback

Your guide to making a comment, compliment or complaint

We are always looking to improve our services. If you have a comment, compliment or complaint let us know. Any comment, good or bad, helps us to understand what people do and don't like about our services, and how we can make them better in the future.

Comments and suggestions

If you have comments or suggestions about how our services could be improved, we would like to hear them and will always acknowledge and pass them to the relevant service.

Make a comment or suggestion

Comments/suggestions

Compliments

Our staff welcome compliments and we appreciate being told when we are doing things right. We will acknowledge any compliments and make sure they are passed to the relevant people.

Give a compliment

Complaints

A complaint is a way to let us know if you are not happy with some aspect of our service.

In the first instance please contact the service concerned as they may be able to remedy your concern quickly and avoid having to go through the formal complaints process. It is helpful if you explain why you are unhappy and what you think should be done to resolve the problem. We will investigate and try to put things right where we can.

Make a complaint

How we deal with complaints

We:

• let you know we have received your complaint within 3 working days
• let you know who will be handling your complaint and make sure we understand what your complaint is about
• find out what you want to happen to put things right
• investigate and respond to you within 20 working days
• let you know if we need more time to investigate your complaint and when we hope to provide a final response
• apologise if we find we have failed to provide the level of service you should expect and look to put things right
• welcome your view of what needs to be done to resolve any problem
• arrange a review of your complaint if you remain unhappy and aim to respond to you within 15 working days

Generally we do not investigate complaints about something you knew about more than 12 months before contacting us for the first time.

Separate procedures

There are separate legal procedures for dealing with:

• appeals about housing register or homeless
  
• appeals about a parking ticket also known as PCNs (Penalty Charge Notices)
  
• appeals against school admissions
  
• appeals against decisions on entitlement to home school transport
  
• appeals against the imposition of an enforcement notice
  
• appeals against school exclusions
  
• complaints about adult social care
  
• complaints about anti-social behaviour
  
• complaints about children and young people’s services
  
• complaints about councillors and their behaviour
  
• complaints about Council Tax, Business Rates and Housing Benefit are dealt with through the Stour Valley and Poole Partnership complaints process (this does not include disputes about entitlement to Council Tax Support and Housing Benefit
• complaints about your child’s school
  
• insurance claims against the council
  
• planning appeals for refusal of planning permission or imposition of conditions

If things are still not right

You can refer your complaint to the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman, who will carry out an independent review.

Please note, the LGSCO will not normally accept a complaint which has not been considered under the council's complaint process first.

Make a complaint to the ombudsman

Complain to ombudsman