How to complain about our service

This section tells you what to do if you are unhappy with our service.

Please note that there is a different process to follow if you are unhappy with our decision on your complaint. If you are unhappy, please see go to 'Asking for a review of an SPSO decision.'

If you are unhappy with the service you have received

It is very important to us that we live up to the commitments we make to you in our standards. We take complaints about our service very seriously and have a special procedure for dealing with them. You should tell us about your concerns
as soon as you can – you should contact us within three weeks of the issue or incident you are unhappy with.

We want to hear from you if you are not satisfied with the service we have provided, whatever the outcome of your complaint. For example, you should contact us if you think we have:

• treated you unfairly or rudely;
• failed to explain things clearly; or
• caused unreasonable delays.

Our service complaint procedure

Step 1 Contact a member of staff.

Step 2 Write to our Director of Corporate Services.

You should use our service complaint form to submit your complaint. Access the form by clicking here.

Step 3 Write to the Independent Reviewer.

Step 1 You can make a complaint about our
service to any member of staff. We will try to deal with the matter as quickly as possible. If you are still unhappy you should ask for, and fill in, our service complaint form. We will pass this to a senior member of staff.

Step 2 Our Director of Corporate Services will consider your service complaint form. They will contact you within three working days of receiving your complaint. They will consider whether we have failed to meet our service standards and will aim to send you a full response within 20 working days.

Step 3 The Independent Reviewer can look at your complaint if you are still unhappy after complaining to the Director of Corporate Services. The final response letter from the Director of Corporate Services will include contact details for the Independent Reviewer. You should contact them within one month of receiving the final response letter. They will contact you within three days of your letter and will aim to reply in full within 40 working days. The Director of Corporate Services and the Independent Reviewer will only consider complaints about our service and not about the decision we have made. If you are unhappy with our decision, see our leaflet ‘Your complaint, our decision.’

Complaints about staff

If you have a complaint about a member of staff, we will tell that person and ask them for their views. They will not be involved in looking into the issue in any other way. If we find that your complaint is justified, we will apologise and tell you how we will deal with the problem. If relevant, we will also tell you how we plan to make sure the mistake does not happen again. If you make a serious allegation of misconduct, we may deal with this through our personnel procedures.

Complaints Statistics

We keep a record of all complaints made about our service and the outcome of each complaint. We produce statistical information about these each year. Statistics dating back to 2003 can be downloaded from our website.

From April 2007 we've produced quarterly reports about service delivery complaints. You'll find links to these below.

Information, recording and monitoring

If we identify shortcomings in our service through a complaint, we use this information to review and improve the service we provide.

We'll tell you about any administrative action that we take as the result of learning from a complaint about our service . But we will not provide information about any action taken against individual member(s) of staff.

We keep a record of all complaints made about our service and record the outcome of each complaint. We produce statistical information relating to these each year.

A table of statistics back to 2003 can be downloaded in PDF format by clicking here

From April 2007 we've produced quarterly reports about service delivery complaints. These can be downloaded in PDF format by clicking the relevant links below.

Year end review, 2009-10
Quarter 3, 2009-10
Quarters 1-2, 2009-10

Year end review, 2008-09
Quarter 3, 2008-09
Quarter 2, 2008-09
Quarter 1, 2008-09

Year end review, 2007-08
Quarter 3, 2007-08
Quarter 2, 2007-08
Quarter 1, 2007-08

Freedom of Information
In August 2008 the Scottish Information Commissioner published his decision regarding our handling of a Freedom of Information request relating to Service Delivery Complaints up to December 2006.

To see the Commissioner’s Decision Notice, reference 080/2008, please click here.

To see the information that has been recommended for release by the Commissioner, please download the PDF file below. We have also published information that is of the same type as that covered by the Commissioner's Decision, but that has been produced since December 2006. If you have any trouble accessing the information in this format, please contact us.

up to December 2006
December 2006 to August 2008
September 2008 to February 2009
March 2009 to September 2009
October 2009 to December 2009
January 2010 to March 2010
April 2010 to June 2010
July 2010 to September 2010
October 2010 to December 2010
January 2011 to March 2011
April 2011 to June 2011
July 2011 to September 2011