Service improvements

Guildford Borough Council

Showing service improvements between 1 April 2021 and 31 March 2022

Find out more about service improvements

When we find fault, we can recommend improvements to systems and processes where they haven’t worked properly, so that others do not suffer from these same problems in future. Common examples are policy changes; procedural reviews; and staff training. Service improvements from decisions are published for 5 years and those from reports are published for 10 years.

Showing 1 - 1 of 1 cases with service improvements

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Downloads the current filtered list of service improvement decisions for Guildford Borough Council as a CSV file.

  • Guildford Borough Council (21 002 213)

    Category: Environment and regulation Date: 15-Feb-2022

    Summary

    Mrs X complained about the Council’s handling of her high hedge complaint and further corporate complaint she made about this. The Council was at fault when it wrongly returned her application form to her neighbour, delayed issuing a report following an inspection visit to her home and failed to respond to an appeal she made against its corporate complaint response. This has caused Mrs X avoidable uncertainty and distress. It also meant that Mrs X spent avoidable time and trouble in chasing the Council for updates and complaining to the Ombudsman. The Council offered to refund the £600 Mrs X paid for her high hedge complaint, and agreed to our further recommendations to address the outstanding injustice its actions have cased to Mrs X.

    Service improvements

    The Council agreed to share this decision with its officers dealing with high hedge complaints to emphasise the Council’s requirement to promptly acknowledge appeal requests when made by members of the public.The Council will review its high hedge policy and/or procedure to ensure that complainants are informed of the progress of their case and to see if it can improve the process to make sure it completes the complaints promptly.

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