Summary: We will not investigate this complaint about a fence which the complainant believes the Council should repair. There is no worthwhile outcome we could achieve by us investigating.

The complaint

1. The person who made the complaint, whom I shall call X, was not happy, because they wrote to the Council several times in 2025, and asked them to repair a fence that was on the boundary of land, that they owned. The Council did not repair the fence and X asked us to investigate the matter.

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The Ombudsman’s role and powers

2. We investigate complaints about ‘maladministration’ and ‘service failure’, which we call ‘fault’. We must also consider whether any fault has had an adverse impact on the person making the complaint, which we call ‘injustice’. We provide a free service, but must use public money carefully. We do not start or continue an investigation if we decide there is no worthwhile outcome achievable by our investigation. (Local Government Act 1974, section 24A(6), as amended, section 34(B))

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How I considered this complaint

3. I considered information provided by the complainant and the Council.
4. I considered the Ombudsman’s Assessment Code.

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My assessment

5. X wrote to the Council several times in 2025, because they said it owned a fence, which was on a boundary of their land. X wrote to us because the Council had not repaired the fence.
6. We will not investigate X’s complaint. This is because we have very limited resources and the matter X has raised with us is not something that would be a good use of public money to investigate.
7. It would be a matter that locally elected representatives may be able to resolve for X.

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Final decision

8. We will not investigate X’s complaint because we could not achieve any worthwhile outcome.

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Investigator's decision on behalf of the Ombudsman