Housing compliments, complaints & suggestions

Find out how to complain or compliment the council about a service.

Page Contents:

Make a general compliment, complaint or suggestion

This page provides information should you wish to make a complaint, compliment or suggestion about the council or a service.

We want to provide you with the best possible service. To help, we’re open to feedback which is used to make improvements.

If we are doing something well, please let us know so we can pass this on to our employees. If there is something you are unhappy with, we want to know so we can put things right and learn from it.

If you are contacting the council for the first time, to report a problem or book a service (such as fixing a pothole or tree maintenance), you can do this online without registering a formal complaint:

Please click below to report a problem to us:
Please select one of the below options to contact us:
If you would like to contact us to make a general comment or suggestion about how we could improve or develop our services, we would love to hear from you.

Make a comment or suggestion online here

Your comment or suggestion will be passed on to the relevant person(s) and if you would like us to, we will get back in touch within 15 working days.
Thank you for taking the time to tell us what we’ve done well.  We really appreciate compliments, as it allows employees to be recognised for their work and helps us to keep improving services.

Submit a compliment online here

Your compliment will be passed to the relevant employee or team so your feedback can be shared with the right people.

Your compliment will be used to help us celebrate what our teams have done well and to encourage high-quality services across the council.

If you would like us to, we will get back in touch within 15 working days.
We’re sorry you are unhappy about the actions, or lack of action, from the council. We want to hear about your experience so we can put things right and learn from what has happened.

Make a complaint online here

For information on the process for complaints management, please refer to this diagram.
Corporate Feedback Process (Complaints)
We want to make sure the right person or team deals with your complaint as quickly as possible and so we have specific processes in place for dealing with different types of complaints:

Complaints in relation to schools

For complaints in relation to schools in Northumberland: For complaints in relation to social care for children For complaints in relation to social care for adults, you should: If you wish to complain about the conduct of an elected member of the council, you must complete a complaints form and return it to us by either post or email.

Please return your completed form, together with any supporting documentation to:

The Monitoring Officer
Legal Services Unit
Northumberland County Council
County Hall
Morpeth
Northumberland
NE61 2EF

Email: monitoringofficer@northumberland.gov.uk

 
If we have already responded to your complaint, but you are unhappy with the decision or outcome, you can ask us to look at your complaint again.

If you would like to ask us to look at your complaint again, the quickest way to do this is by filling in our online form by clicking here:

Re-submit a complaint online here

Alternatively, you can contact the council’s complaints team: Once we receive your request, we’ll look again at the original complaint and the response. We will write to you with the results of our investigation within 20 working days.

What if I am still unhappy?
Should you remain unhappy with the response which you receive, you have the right to contact the local government ombudsman at:

The Local Government Ombudsman
PO Box 4771
Coventry
CV4 0EH
If you make a complaint, it must be about why you think a member has not followed their code.

The member’s code of conduct is part of the county council constitution. To assist you, we have also prepared an indicative flowchart that sets out how the process works for handling complaints about elected members.  Recent decisions All other complaints

Any complaint other than those mentioned above is covered by the council’s corporate complaints procedure. When dealing with complaints through this procedure, we aim to:
  • wherever possible, reach an agreement with you straight away to put things right
  • acknowledge receipt of your complaint within three working days
  • respond in full within 15 working days
  • keep you informed about progress and agree a timescale for responding if a response will take longer

The Housing Ombudsman’s Complaint Handling Code

The Housing Ombudsman launched a new code about the way landlords handle complaints. It’s called The Housing Ombudsman’s Complaint Handling Code. The code helps us to resolve complaints made to Housing Services quickly. It also helps us to learn from complaints and use this learning to drive service improvements.

We've recently completed a self-assessment against the code of how we handle complaints. You can find our assessment here. We'll complete a new self-assessment every year too.

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