Durham County Council aims to provide services of the highest quality. You can help us to shape these services by letting us know your thoughts. We realise that sometimes we get things wrong and people are not always happy with what we do. When this happens we will listen to your concerns and do our best to resolve your problems.
Please use the complaints online form if you do need to make a complaint.
Specific statutory complaints procedures
We are required by law to have separate arrangements for handling statutory complaints. Some of our services have their own specialised way of dealing with statutory complaints and these include:
- Adult social care complaints, please see Adult Wellbeing and Health
- Children and Young People's social care complaints - please contact the Complaints Officer, Children and Young People's Service (contact details below)
- Complaints about schools - please contact the head teacher of the school. For advice, contact School and Governor Support Service (contact details below)
Putting things right
Complaints are extremely valuable because they give us the opportunity to put things right if there have been mistakes and, just as importantly, to improve our services making sure the same mistakes are not repeated.
What is a complaint?
A complaint is an expression of dissatisfaction about the standard of service, action or lack of action by the council, its staff or contractors/agents providing services on behalf of the council affecting an individual customer or group of customers.
Our complaints procedure does not cover:
- requests for a service (if we do receive a service request we will process as normal)
- requests for information or an explanation of policy or practice
- matters where there is already a process for legal remedy, for example a planning appeal to the Planning Inspectorate
- complaints regarding Children and Young People’s social care services
- complaints regarding adult's social care services
- complaints that have been heard by a court or tribunal
- complaints about a councillor who may have contravened the council’s code of conduct - these must be addressed to the council’s Monitoring Officer.
How to make a complaint
You can make a complaint:
- through a county councillor, or face to face at any of our Customer Access Points
- in writing. The contact details for our Corporate Complaints Unit are below
- by filling in our the complaints online form
- by filling in our complaint forms which you can find in libraries and at any of our Customer Access Points
- if you prefer you can call a member of the Corporate Complaints Unit on 0300 123 70 70
- through someone on your behalf. For example a friend, advocate or lawyer.
If you wish to complain about the service you have received from the council or its staff, please contact us as soon as possible and provide as much information as you can. Include details such as:
- the service, policy, person or aspect of the council you are complaining about
- if appropriate, the date, time and location where an incident may have taken place and who may have been affected
- any expectations you may have had of council services, as a result of information we provided or what staff or county councillors may have said
- your name, address and contact details so that we can respond to your complaint
- any other information you think will help us to investigate your concerns.
How we handle complaints
Initially we will try to resolve your complaint informally to your satisfaction and as quickly as possible after we have received it.
Stage one
If your concerns cannot be resolved immediately, you will get an acknowledgement of receipt of your complaint within two working days from the date it was first received.
Your complaint will be forwarded to the Complaints Officer in the department concerned for investigation. We will provide you with a comprehensive written response within ten working days of receiving your initial complaint.
This could be our final response or a progress update on how we are investigating your concerns. Where we have provided you with a progress update, we will continue to provide you with further progress updates until your concerns have been dealt with.
When we write with our full response, we will ask you how satisfied you were with the way your complaint was handled. This helps us improve your experience in dealing with the council.
Stage two
If you are still not satisfied you have the right to request that your complaint be further reviewed under stage two of the procedure. To do this you or someone on your behalf, will need to contact our Corporate Complaints team who will again issue an acknowledgement letter within two working days of receiving notification from yourself that you are not satisfied with the stage one response.
The Complaints Officer who dealt with your query in stage one will be informed and the information will be sent to the relevant head of department who, together with Corporate Complaints team will make further investigations into, or a review of your complaint.
We will send you a full written response within 20 working days and we will continue to provide you with further progress reports until your complaint has been dealt with.
Stage three
If all the stages of the council's procedures have been exhausted and you are still not happy with the way we are handling or have handled your complaint, you can refer the matter to the Local Government Ombudsman, who will carry out an independent investigation on your behalf.
The ombudsman can only do this if you have taken your complaint through the council's system.
Local Government Ombudsman (LGO)
The Local Government Ombudsman is an independent body which investigates allegations of maladministration causing injustice to the person who has complained. The ombudsman investigates complaints about most council matters including housing, planning, education, social services and council tax. Where the ombudsman is involved in a complaint against the council, our Head of Legal and Democratic Services will handle the complaint, in consultation with the relevant department.
The ombudsman produces an annual report which provides a summary of complaints made about the county council, and also comments on the council's performance and complaint handling arrangements.
Complaints against councillors
If you are unhappy about the way that a councillor has behaved, these complaints are handled by the our Standards Committee. Further information and advice about this is available on our Complaints about Councillors web page or you can contact Democratic Services using the details below.
Anonymous complaints
We will investigate anonymous complaints thoroughly where it is possible and appropriate to do so.
Quarterly report of complaints
Every three months we will report to the Standards Committee on:
- the number and types of complaints received
- the average time taken to respond
- the number of satisfied customers who have used this process.
We will also say how we have changed policies, procedures or practices in response to your complaints.
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