Have you given the council a chance to investigate the complaint and respond to you?

By law, the Ombudsman may not investigate a complaint before a council has had a reasonable opportunity to investigate and respond to it. Generally, the Ombudsman considers that a ‘reasonable opportunity’ is 12 weeks from the date when someone first made a written complaint to a council. The Ombudsman encourages people to use councils’ complaints procedures. You do not necessarily have to exhaust all stages of those procedures before coming to the Ombudsman provided you have allowed a council a ‘reasonable opportunity’ to deal with the matter as described above.

There are some areas of complaint where, exceptionally, the Ombudsman will consider becoming involved sooner. These include circumstances where:

• time is of the essence – eg education admission appeals / where possession proceedings have started and your client is at risk of eviction.
• someone is particularly vulnerable
• it appears that an entire administrative system has broken down

Each case is considered individually, so if you think there may be exceptional factors why the case you are dealing with should be considered by the Ombudsman even though a council may not have had a reasonable opportunity of dealing with it first, please let us know why.

It is very helpful for us is you can explain what steps you have taken to resolve the matter for your client and enclose any copies of correspondence you may have had with the council and any other relevant documents.

Even when we decide that a complaint we receive needs to be sent to the council to consider under its own complaints procedure first, we will follow it up by writing to the complainant again to check whether they are satisfied with the outcome. If not, or if there has been unreasonable delay by the council in dealing with the complaint, the complainant can ask the Ombudsman to get involved at that stage.