Summary: We will not investigate the Council’s handling of Miss X’s complaint about inadequate road signs leading to the issue of a penalty charge notice. This is because the injustice she claims stems from the penalty charge notice itself and if Miss X disputed this it would have been reasonable for her to appeal. The complaints handling issue itself did not cause Miss X significant enough to warrant further investigation.

The complaint

1. Miss X complains the Council did not respond to her complaint about a penalty charge notice (PCN), made alongside her representations against the PCN. She says that as a result she was not able to challenge the PCN further.
2. Miss X wants the Council to apologise and acknowledge it failed to respond to her complaint. She also wants the Council to reimburse the cost of her paid PCN.

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The Ombudsman’s role and powers

3. 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 any injustice is not significant enough to justify our involvement.
   (Local Government Act 1974, section 24A(6), as amended, section 34(B))
4. The Local Government Act 1974 sets out our powers but also imposes restrictions on what we can investigate.
5. The law says we cannot normally investigate a complaint when someone has a right of appeal, reference or review to a tribunal about the same matter. However, we may decide to investigate if we consider it would be unreasonable to expect the person to use this right. (Local Government Act 1974, section 26(6)(a), as amended)
6. The Traffic Penalty Tribunal considers parking and moving traffic offence appeals for all areas of England outside London.

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How I considered this complaint

7. I considered information provided by Miss X and the Council.
8. I considered the Ombudsman’s Assessment Code.

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My assessment

9. The law allows us to consider complaints from members of the public who claim to have suffered an injustice from the actions of bodies within our jurisdiction. It also restricts our ability to investigate complaints about certain issues and gives us a wide discretion to decide whether to investigate complaints about actions which fall within our jurisdiction.
10. While Miss X complains about the Council’s handling of her complaint, the substantive issue and the injustice she claims stems from changes to the road layout/signage warning of the bus gate restriction and the subsequent PCN she received from the Council for not complying with the restriction. The complaints process does not provide an alternative mechanism for dealing with these issues and Miss X was correctly advised, in response to her representations, to appeal if she did not accept the response.
11. The Council accepts it did not respond to Miss X’s complaint separately at that time but the response to her representation was sufficiently clear that it is reasonable to expect her to have appealed.
12. We will not separately investigate Miss X’s complaint about the Council’s failure to respond to her initial complaint because the issue did not cause her significant injustice.

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Final decision

13. We will not investigate this complaint. This is because Miss X’s injustice stems from the issue of the PCN and it would have been reasonable for her to appeal against this to the Traffic Penalty Tribunal. The Council’s failure to respond to Miss X’s initial complaint did not cause significant enough injustice to warrant further investigation as a standalone issue.

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Investigator's decision on behalf of the Ombudsman