Complaints and Feedback Policy

Where we have not been able to resolve your complaint with an early resolution, a senior officer from the service receiving feedback will oversee an investigation to try and resolve the issues. The person handling your complaint will:

• clarify with you any aspects of the complaint they are unclear about
• deal with complaints on their merits, act independently, and have an open mind
• give you a fair chance to set out your position
• take measures to address any actual or perceived conflict of interest
• consider all relevant information and evidence carefully

We aim to respond to you within 10 working days of acknowledging your complaint. If we cannot respond in 10 working days, we will let you know when we expect to respond and the reason for the delay. We should not take longer than 20 working days to respond to you at stage 1 without good reason. Where we respond to you by phone, we may send a follow-up email or letter with a summary of the conversation. We keep a record of the stage 1 outcome.

If you are not happy with the response you receive at Stage 1, you can contact us within 20 working days and ask for a senior officer to consider your complaint at Stage 2 of the complaints process

Please note:

We generally expect you to escalate your complaint to Stage 2 of the complaints process within 20 working days of receiving our Stage 1 response. However, we understand this is not always possible and you may want to give us an opportunity to resolve matters before escalating your complaint further. Therefore, we will generally accept requests to escalate complaints to Stage 2 which are made within six months of you receiving our stage 1 response.

It is important that you escalate your complaint as soon as possible if you remain unhappy with our response. It can be challenging for us to properly consider complaints as more time passes between the issue you are complaining about and our consideration of your complaint. This is because it may be difficult to obtain relevant evidence and people involved may not be able to accurately recollect what happened. Therefore, would not consider any Stage 2 request more than 6 months after the Stage 1 response unless there is a good reason to do so.