How is your council performing?

We have published our 2023-24 complaints statistics and the annual letter from the Ombudsman for every English local authority. Find out how your council did on our Councils Performance Map and read our Annual Review report explaining the national trends.

Contact us

If you want to register a new complaint

Please first read our step by step process for making a complaint. This explains what you need to do before registering a new complaint with us.

Once you have, please create an account for our online complaint service and complete a new complaint form. This is the quickest way to register a new complaint.

You will also be able to:

  • communicate with us through messaging at certain stages
  • see the progress of your complaint when you log in to your account
  • store your complaint correspondence and documents in one secure place

If you cannot use our online complaint service, you can register a complaint in the other ways, which are shown below.

If you are having problems trying to use our online complaint service, first read the Frequently Asked Questions, then call us if this does not help. 

Telephone

Call 0300 061 0614 to talk to a complaints advisor about registering a new complaint. 

The telephone line opening times are:

  • Monday - 10am to 1pm
  • Tuesday - 10am till 1pm
  • Wednesday - 1pm till 4pm
  • Thursday - closed
  • Friday - 10am till 1pm

We tend to receive more calls the first hour after opening. If you want to avoid waiting in a queue, you could try calling after this.

Please be aware that even if you speak to a complaints advisor, we will usually ask you to complete the online form if you can. We are here to help as best we can, but our staff will not tolerate verbal abuse or threatening behaviour.

Post

It will take a little longer to reach us, but you can make a new complaint by post

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British Sign Language

If you are a user of British Sign Language, you can contact us via InterpretersLive! – a free online service provided by a company called SignSolutions

If you have an existing complaint

  • Please contact your named person in the usual way you reach them.
  • If you do not have a named person, we will contact you when we have an update on your case. Our helpline team are usually not able to tell you about your case once you have been allocated a named person.

If you have an urgent or emergency problem

  • Please contact your local authority or care provider. We expect them to respond appropriately to concerns, and we usually expect you to have completed their complaints process before we can consider your complaint

Other types of enquiries

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