Feedback, complaints and compliments

Making a complaint

If you are making a complaint, please only complete the form if you would like to make a formal complaint about one of our services.

Please note, we will not treat the following as a complaint:

  • a request for a service or for information
  • reporting a fault
  • offering a comment about a service
  • disagreement with a rule of law applied by the Council (e.g. parking penalty charge notices)

Make a complaint

The complaints process 

Stage One 

You should tell a member of staff or the manager responsible for the service as soon as you can and they will see if they can sort it out.

We aim to respond to you within 15 working days (Housing Landlord complaints aim to be responded to within 10 working days). If we cannot reply within this time, we will let you know.

We will normally only consider complaints about things which happened within the past 12 months. However, in some cases, we may be able to consider complaints outside of this period

If you are not happy with our response, tell us.  We will listen to your concerns and, if appropriate, take your complaint to the second stage.

Some complaints (for example, those about planning applications, school admission appeals, parking tickets and adult and children’s social care) may be investigated by separate government procedures.

Stage Two - Review

If you remain dissatisfied with the response to your stage 1, please contact us within 28 days and request a stage 2 review. You will need to state the issues you remain dissatisfied with and the outcome you seek. This request will then be reviewed by the Customer Care service.

This means that a senior council officer who has not been involved in your case before will reconsider your complaint and will send you a response within 15 working days (Housing Landlord complaints aim to be responded to within 20 working days) or tell you if it will take longer and let you know when you can expect a full reply.

The Local Government Ombudsman 

If you are still not happy with our response at stage two, you can contact the Local Government Ombudsman. The Ombudsman will consider any complaint you have made and give you their views.

The Ombudsman usually suggests that you use the Council’s complaints procedure first and will only investigate complaints that are considered to be about maladministration — that is, inefficient or unfair administration.

Find out more on the Local Government Ombudsman website 

Housing Ombudsman 

If your complaint is specifically about social housing you need to contact the Housing Ombudsman. Find out more on their website: Housing Ombudsman

Childrens services

Please find information on who to make a complaint about childrens services on our website. 

Councillor's complaints

If your complaint is about a councillor you can report this online via make a complaint about a councillor page

Corporate complaints, comments and compliments procedure

You can download the full Corporate complaints, comments and compliments procedure

Last Modified: 20/09/2022 09:48:14

Customer Care team

Address: Guildhall 2
High Street
Kingston
KT1 1EU

Telephone: 0208 547 5000