Issue - meetings

To provide the annual corporate complaints report.

Members were provided with an annual update on corporate complaints including complaints that had been investigated by the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman and the Housing Ombudsman.

Members were pleased to see the very low number of complaints about customer services, given the number of customers that they deal with on the telephone and via email daily. The relatively low number of complaints about the refuse & recycling service was also highlighted, given the number of bins collected each week. The number of complaints about the planning service were also noted, but it was acknowledged that the majority of these were dissatisfaction with a decision rather than alleged service faults.

In response to a question in relation to the persistent and unreasonable complainant behaviour policy, it was explained that there were various tests before this could be applied to an individual and it did not relate only to the number of complaints submitted.

Members requested further information on the two investigations undertaken by the Local Government & Social Care Ombudsman where no fault was found, and requested graphs for all headline figures highlighted in the report to show changes over the past few years. It was also requested that future reports also contain the number of formal compliments received.

RESOLVED –

(i)            The report be noted;

(ii)          The information requested be provided to members;

(iii)         Future reports include the number of formal compliments received.