Fylde Council believes in listening, taking account of, and responding to your views. Our staff are committed to always providing excellent standards of customer care.
Your Views are Important to Us – How to Share Your Views
Whether you have a concern, a complaint or a compliment about a council service, or you may just have some feedback to make, you can do this by the following options below. Your feedback helps us to improve our services.
Give Feedback or a Compliment – How Did We Do
Complete our Feedback Form to tell us what we’re doing well or how we can improve.
We will pass your feedback on to the relevant service, and we will consider feedback in an open-minded and impartial way and will use it to help improve our services.
Have your say on our services and win a £50 One4All voucher! Terms and Conditions apply.
Report It – Report an Issue
If you need to report a problem or request a service for the first time, this should NOT be logged as a complaint. Please use our Report It section here.
Reporting an issue is not the same as making a complaint
Where there is an appeal procedure for actions taken, such as planning decisions or licensing applications, please make sure you follow the relevant appeal procedure
Complaints
What Counts as a Complaint?
The Council has a complaints process and a definition of the areas that would constitute a complaint are outlined below:
- When the Council fails to do something that we promised to do
- When the Council has done something badly or wrong
- When you feel you have been treated unfairly or impolitely
- When the Council fails to respond properly to a service request or report
Our Complaints Process
Our complaints process is part of our wider Customer Care Policy, which sets out our standards for responding to all customer contacts.
Complete our Complaints Form to log a complaint. In the first instance we will acknowledge your complaint and act upon it and make sure that you get a full response. We aim to resolve complaints quickly and fairly.
The complaint procedure has two stages:
Stage One – The responsible service area will deal with your complaint based on the form submission and provide a response within 10 working days.
Stage Two – You can request for your complaint to be escalated if you do not receive a response within the 10-working day deadline, or if you are not satisfied with the response you are given. The complaint will be referred to an appropriate Service Director, who will investigate the matter and provide a response within 20 working days of the Stage Two request.
A response at any stage in the complaints process MUST meet one of the following within the relevant target time (10 working days for Stage One and 20 working days for Stage Two):
- A clear resolution of the complaint, with a full response provided to the person who made the complaint and anyone representing them (e.g., an elected member).
- A holding response that clearly states:
- Who is dealing with the complaint, including their name (not just their job title) and contact details.
- Why there is a delay in providing a full response or resolution within the target timeframe.
- When the full response will be provided.
Failure to provide either a full response or a holding response within the relevant target time is grounds for escalating the complaint at any stage of the process.
Your Local Councillor – you can at any time, refer a complaint to your local councillor, who can take up the complaint on your behalf. However, it must be remembered that everyone, including councillors, will be treated fairly and equally through the internal process.
Complaints to external bodies
The two stages of our complaints process form the procedure for dealing with complaints internally. You are, however, entitled to refer your concerns to external bodies if you are unhappy with the way we have dealt with your complaints or if you feel that the outcome is unsatisfactory. You can speak to:
Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman – the local government ombudsman will want to be sure that you have already been through our internal complaint procedure and that the Council has had an opportunity to address your concerns. The Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman can also be contacted regarding matters of personal injustice.
The Local Government Ombudsman can be contacted at:
- The Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman PO Box 4771 Coventry CV4 0EH
Online at http://www.lgo.org.uk
For advice on making a complaint, or to make a complaint over the telephone, please call the LGO Advice Team on 0300 061 0614 or 0845 602 1983. (Calls to 03 numbers will cost no more than calls to national geographic numbers (starting 01or 02) from both mobiles and landlines and will be included as part of any inclusive call minutes or discount schemes in the same way as geographic calls. Please note that calls may be recorded for training and quality purposes.) The Advice Team are available Monday to Friday from 8.30am to 5.00pm. You can also text ‘call back’ to 0762 480 4299.
Please click here to view Fylde Council’s performance in the Annual Review Letter from the LGO.
Complaints About Council Members (Elected or Co-opted)
All members of the council – whether elected or co-opted – must abide by the council’s Code of Conduct which governs their behaviour and actions when they carry out their duties as local authority members.
If you wish to make a complaint about a council member breaching the Code of Conduct, please send this in writing to the council’s monitoring officer. The monitoring officer will aim to provide an acknowledgement to the complainant within 5 working days. This response may indicate further timescales depending on the nature of the allegation.
Your complaint should set out:
- The name of the council member
- Date and detail of the incident
- Your name and contact details
Please send the complaint about a council member to the Monitoring Officer: tracy.manning@fylde.gov.uk
