How we deal with your complaint
First look at your complaint
If you register a complaint with us, the first thing we do is check that you have:
- come to the right place
- given us all the information we need
- complained formally to the organisation involved and given it a reasonable chance to respond
- got consent to complain, if you are complaining on someone's behalf
If we need more information at this stage we will contact you.
Deciding whether to investigate your complaint
If we are satisfied you have taken the steps above, we will allocate your complaint to an investigator in our Assessment Team. They will decide whether we can, and whether we should, look at your complaint in more detail. We will then write to you to explain whether we have decided to investigate your complaint.
Our service is free to use. But we have to decide how to best use our publicly funded resources. We cannot investigate all complaints we receive.
We are more likely to investigate complaints where the issues:
- have had a serious or long-term impact on people’s lives
- affect many other people
We are less likely to investigate complaints where:
- the issues have caused minor irritation or upset
- we cannot ask the organisation to do what you want them to
For more information about how we decide whether or not to investigate your complaint, read our Assessment Code
Investigating your complaint
If we decide your complaint needs more detailed work, we will pass it to our Investigation Team and tell you who will deal with your complaint.
We may then ask you and the organisation you’re complaining about for more information. We will keep you updated on the progress with your complaint.
We do not take sides, when we decide to investigate we look fairly at what happened, carefully considering the evidence.
When we think we have enough information to make a fair decision, we will share a draft decision with you. We can share information from the organisation, which we have used to make our decision. But we cannot share sensitive information, for example where it is about other people. We will give you a chance to comment or give us any further information you want us to consider before we make a final decision.
When we make a final decision we will send you a short report that explains the reasons behind our decision. We will send a copy of the decision to the organisation you complained about.
Our decisions are final but we have procedures for Challenging our decisions and Complaints about our service
If you need help using our service
We will do our best to communicate with you in the way you have requested. However we must use public money carefully so what we can offer will depend on our resources (for example staff time and money).
For more information see our Reasonable Adjustments Policy.
See our leaflets page for information about our service in EasyRead and other formats.
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How long does it take?
Once your complaint is sent to our Assessment Team, at the moment we are likely to tell you within 9 - 10 weeks whether we will investigate your complaint.
We aim to tell you this as soon as possible, so we will respond sooner if we can. However, our Assessment Team is currently dealing with a lot of complaints.
If your complaint goes to our Investigation stage, it can take many months for us to decide your complaint. Every complaint is different so we cannot say exactly how long it will take.
We need to collect enough information to make a fair decision. We may also need to allow time for the organisation to respond at certain points.
To speed up the process as much as possible, please make sure you respond to our requests for comments or information as soon as you can.
Please note that we deal with complaints in the order we receive them. This means there will be times when your complaint is waiting to be allocated to one of our investigators to work on.
Publishing our decisions
We publish most decisions on our website six weeks after we complete them. For more information go to What the outcome will be