Putting things right

If we find that the council has done something wrong we can ask the council to take action to put the matter right. What we ask the council to do will depend on the particular complaint, how serious the fault was and how you have been affected by what has gone wrong.

The Ombudsmen have no legal power to force councils to follow their recommendations, but councils almost always do.

Some of the things we might ask a council to do are:

• apologise to you
• pay you compensation
• do repairs to your council home
• take action or make a decision that it should have done before
• reconsider a decision that it did not take properly in the first place
• improve its procedures so that similar problems do not happen again to you or anyone else
• consider taking enforcement action against an unauthorised building close to your home, or against the unauthorised use of a building, or
• hold another school admission appeal hearing for your child

Date Published: 23/07/08