Summary: Mr X complains the Council inappropriately affixed a notice to his car which he had to clean off. Mr X also complains the Council failed to properly deal with his complaint about this. We will not investigate as the outstanding injustice to Mr X is not sufficient to warrant our involvement.

The complaint

1. Mr X complains the Council inappropriately affixed a notice to his car which had to be cleaned off. Mr X also complains the Council failed to properly deal with his complaint about this.

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The Ombudsman’s role and powers

2. We investigate complaints about ‘maladministration’ and ‘service failure’. In this statement, I have used the word ‘fault’ to refer to these. We must also consider whether any fault has had an adverse impact on the person making the complaint. I refer to this as ‘injustice’. We provide a free service, but must use public money carefully. We may decide not to start or continue with an investigation if we believe the fault has not caused injustice to the person who complained (Local Government Act 1974, section 24A(6), as amended)

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How I considered this complaint

3. I have considered what Mr X said in his complaint and I have sent him my draft decision on it for his comments.

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What I found

4. Mr X complained to the Council that a notice was inappropriately attached to his car by its waste operatives. Mr X says his car was not blocking the access of the waste lorry and is unhappy as he says Council staff were laughing as they were affixing the notices. Mr X complains the Council did not properly respond to his first stage complaint and has failed to reply to his second.
5. Mr X says he was put to some trouble as he had to remove the notice and clean his car.
6. The Council has acknowledged to me that its first complaint response to Mr X was lacking in that it was based on assumptions rather than an account of what took place. It says that whilst it is standard practice for its staff to place stickers on cars that are blocking access, it cannot say which cars that had notices attached to them on this occasion were, or had been, actually blocking access. The Council also acknowledges that the notices were not properly filled out by its staff. The Council has raised this with its staff and refresher training has been given. The Council says it has reviewed available CCTV and has not seen evidence of its staff behaving inappropriately in any other regard.
7. The Council says its records show that a stage 2 response should have been made to Mr X but that there is no record that this was done.

Analysis

8. The Council has acknowledged that things did go wrong in this case. It has agreed to send Mr X an apology for this and a Stage 2 response. I do not consider we can add to this or that the remaining injustice to Mr X is sufficient to warrant our involvement. We will not therefore investigate.

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Final decision

9. My decision is we will not investigate this complaint as the remaining injustice to Mr X is not sufficient to warrant our involvement.

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Investigator's decision on behalf of the Ombudsman