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Complaints can be made in writing (letter or email), by phone or by using our online form. Complaints can also be made via social media.
Please be aware, however, that if you make a complaint via social media, unless it has come to the Council via private messaging, it will be visible to the public. The Council will not be able to respond to your complaint via social media but will contact you to ask that you provide alternative means of communication such as a contact number, address or email address.
Once received as a valid complaint (not a service request), the Council has five working days to acknowledge your complaint under stage one of its process.
Your complaint will be forwarded to the relevant service area for investigation and response by the most appropriate person to respond to it. That might be a team leader, or a manager, for example.
We will acknowledge your complaint and define it within five working days of its receipt.
The stage one response will be sent to you within ten working days of acknowledgement.
If there are reasons why we cannot respond within those time limits, our extension should be no more than a further ten working days and we will clearly explain this to you.
If you are unhappy with the outcome of the stage one response, you can contact us further and we will implement stage two of the process.
We will acknowledge your complaint and define it within five working days of its receipt.
Stage two complaint responses will be issued within twenty working days of acknowledgement.
If there are reasons why we cannot respond within those time limits, our extension should be no more than a further twenty working days and we will clearly explain this to you.
After the Council has issued you with a stage one response, you have the right to ask for a stage two review. A stage two review will only focus on how the stage one complaint was handled. It will not address your complaint.
You are able to contact the Ombudsman if you remain dissatisfied with the outcome of our complaints procedure. You can contact the Housing Ombudsman Service 
or the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman .
A factsheet is available on the Housing Ombudsman webpage which sets out the social housing complaint categories that should be referred to either the Housing Ombudsman or the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman.
If your response relates to a regulatory matter, there is usually a separate right of complaint channel, for example, if you are unhappy about a planning decision or the outcome of an environmental health inspection, and this would have been explained to you in our complaint response.
A service request is a request requiring action to be taken to put something right.
A complaint is a dissatisfaction with a service (and that can include if you are dissatisfied with a service request).
We have some examples of service requests and complaints here which you may find helpful. These are not exhaustive, and we accept there will be times when it is not clear but we will work with you to understand your complaint and how we can best handle it.
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