How to Complain
Are you thinking of complaining to us?
Resources on this page explain when you should register a complaint with us and how to do it in the most efficient way
The Steps
Give the organisation a chance to put things right
The first step is to complain directly to the organisation you’re unhappy with. This gives them the opportunity to resolve the problem first. We cannot look into your complaint before that happens.
You’ll usually need to go through all stages of their complaints process. We have advice to help you do this:
If you’ve completed the organisation’s complaints process and you’re still unhappy with the response, you can complain to us.
You can also come to us if you’ve complained but haven’t received a response within a reasonable time. In most cases, we think this should be up to 16 weeks. Be aware that some complaints, like those about children’s services, can take longer because organisations must follow a specific complaints process set out in law with multiple stages.
If you’re unsure whether it’s the right time, you can start a complaint and our online complaint form will ask you some questions to help you decide whether you should submit your complaint now.
We are free to use. You can complain on someone else’s behalf if you have their permission, or if you have a legal right to act for them.
Check what we can and cannot look at
There are some things we’re allowed to investigate and some things we’re not. This is because the law sets clear limits on our role.
We can look at complaints about:
- Most council services
- Adult social care services that are paid for privately
- Public services provided by some other local organisations
We cannot look into your complaint if:
- More than 12 months have passed since you first knew about the problem
- We think the issue has not affected you significantly or the fault is not serious enough
- There is a better way for you to fix the problem like through a tribunal, court or review process
- You are already taking legal action or using a tribunal
We have to close most of the cases we receive for these reasons, so we strongly recommend you check whether we can look at your complaint, before you submit it.
If your issue is something we’re not allowed to look at, we’ll explain why and help point you to the right place for support.
Submit your complaint
When you go to submit your complaint, our online form will ask you some short questions before getting you to create an account and give us more detail.
These questions try to save you time by making sure – as best we can at this stage – that we are the right place for you to get help and that we might be able to look at your complaint.
If you already have an account, you can log in and continue.
We also have extra information on what to do if:
- You need a different way to submit a complaint to us
- You think you might need extra help to use our service (also known as reasonable adjustments)
What happens next
There are three main stages to our process.
After you submit your complaint, we’ll start by taking a first look to check we have all the information we need.
If we move your complaint to our second stage, our Assessment Team will decide whether we’re allowed to investigate your complaint and whether we should do so.
If we pass your complaint to our Investigation Team, they will take a closer look at what happened.
At every stage we will tell you what is happening and what you can expect. We’ll also ask if you need any extra support to use our service.
We appreciate you’ll be keen to fix the issue that made you come to us. But we need to tell you that using our service can take time, and we cannot help with every complaint.
Click here for our current waiting times.