Summary: The Ombudsman will not investigate the complainant’s concerns about the Council’s handling of his emails and complaints. This is because the underlying matter, which the complainant originally contacted the Council about, does not cause him a significant personal injustice, and his concerns about the Council’s associated complaints process do not warrant investigation in isolation.

The complaint

1. The complainant, whom I refer to as Mr B, raises various concerns about the Council failing to follow its complaints process between July and November 2019, after he reported overflowing bins in the local area. In particular, Mr B says the Council:
• Has provided incorrect information about when the bins would be monitored and emptied;
• Failed to distinguish between complaints and service requests;
• Failed to reply to emails/complaints, and failed to reply to emails/complaints by the deadline stated in the Council’s acknowledgements;
• Was not clear in its responses about which of his emails/complaints it was responding to;
• Does not provided a copy of the complaint/text, when a person submits a complaint via the Council’s website;
• Prevented him from speaking to anyone about his concerns, contrary to its ‘Customer First’ commitments;
• Failed to address all the issues raised in the complaints, and then closed the matter, with incorrect information subsequently entered into its complaint case history database;
• Failed to escalate a complaint to Stage 2 when requested.

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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, or
• the injustice is not significant enough to justify our involvement. (Local Government Act 1974, section 24A(6), as amended)

3. And it is not a good use of public resources to investigate complaints about complaint procedures, if we are unable to deal with the substantive issue.

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How I considered this complaint

4. I have considered:
• Mr B’s initial complaint to the Ombudsman, and the information/correspondence he subsequently provided on 4 February 2020;
• The main complaint correspondence between Mr B and the Council from 20 September to 20 November 2019;
• Online ‘street-view’ images of the location of the litter bins, to ascertain their proximity to Mr B’s home;
• Mr B’s comments on a draft version of this statement, including photographs he has taken of the bins over the last couple of years.

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What I found

5. I appreciate Mr B says his complaint to the Ombudsman is about the Council not following its complaint process, rather than the overflowing litter bins in his local area. But the Ombudsman must consider the underlying issue that initially prompted Mr B to contact the Council, and how it affects him.
6. I understand Mr B’s desire to improve the appearance of his local area. But, having considered his photographs and the proximity of the bins to his home, I am not persuaded the condition of the bins causes Mr B a significant personal injustice.
7. As the underlying issue does not cause Mr B a significant injustice then, with reference to paragraph 3 above, we would not normally investigate his associated concerns about the Council’s complaints process in isolation. I appreciate Mr B has spent time and trouble on attempting to correspond with the Council, and was frustrated by its handling of his emails/complaints. But given that the underlying matter does not affect him to a significant degree/directly, the steps he took to complain about the complaints process were of his own choosing, rather than something which flowed inevitably from his original concerns about the bins.

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Final decision

8. The Ombudsman will not investigate Mr B’s complaint. This is because the condition of the litter bins does not cause Mr B a significant injustice, and there are insufficient grounds to consider his concerns about the handling of his complaint in isolation.

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Investigator's decision on behalf of the Ombudsman