The Council is committed to providing the best possible level of service to all of its customers. Not everyone is satisfied with the service they receive. The corporate complaints policy and monitoring procedures are in place to resolve complaints and to make sure we improve where necessary.

Each Service Area records all complaints and compliments, no matter how they are received, to help us identify and address any issues that result in customer dissatisfaction.

The analysis attached with this report (Appendix 1) is based on the information received from each Service Area for the period 1^st April 2007 - 31^st March 2008.

The number of reported complaints received by the Council during 2007/08 was 338, compared with 557 during 2006/07 - a decrease of 39.3%. It should be noted however that the high number of complaints in 2006/07 were due to the introduction of the three stream waste collection and the high level customer contact. A comparison with the complaints received in 2005/06, of which there were 441, shows a reduction of 23%.

Table 2 below shows how people prefer to contact the Council with their complaints. Whilst in 2006/07 the preferred option was via the contact centre, in 2007/08 this drastically reduced with customers contacting service areas via the telephone or letter.

The category “Quality of Service” attracted the most complaints in 2007/08 (202), although when compared to 2006/07, the number has almost halved.

Response times are well within their time limits with very few going beyond the fifteen day timescale.

The majority of complaints (95%) are resolved at Stage 1 (officer level) with very few being escalated to Service Manager or Chief Executive.

As shown in Table 6 below, Operational Services have received the highest number of complaints this year, due to the nature of the services provided and account for 61% of the complaints received.

The Service Areas with no complaints reported over the year are Financial Services, Human Resources and IT Services.

The Council received a total of 154 compliments during 2007/08 - an increase of 41% from 2006/07. Human Resources received the highest number of compliments (33), with Economic Development and Engineering & Special Projects each receiving 28 and 24 respectively.

The following corrective actions have been put into place during 2006/07 to ensure the effective and efficient resolving of various complaints received and attempt to avoid further complaints being made.

Parks & Outdoor Recreation - Reception is now kept informed of any issues thought to generate a lot of complaints to prevent customers calls being passed around. Most complaints received within Parks do tend to be more service requests or informing the Service Area of issues they're not aware of, i.e. vandalism / broken glass within parks and playgrounds.

Despite our best efforts, some of our customers have felt the need to contact the Local Government Ombudsman in order to resolve their complaint.

In 2007/08 the Ombudsman received 18 complaints from Pendle residents covering a range of service areas. Planning & Building Control complaints continue to be the largest group but the numbers overall are too low to enable meaningful conclusions to be drawn.

Even though the numbers are low, it is significant that complaints have dropped from 34 in 2006/07 to 18 in 2007/08. This is very encouraging news.

The breakdown of complaints is as follows:

Out of the 18 complaints where a decision has been reached, 8 were classed as “premature” - that is where the complainant has not allowed the Council an opportunity to deal with the complaint in the first instance.

Of the 14 complaints that were investigated, just two were determined as local settlements- decisions by letter discontinuing the Ombudsman's investigations because we had agreed to take some action which the Ombudsman considered a satisfactory outcome for the complainant. Neither of these indicated widespread problems or failings. Indeed, one of them indicated a real willingness on our part to address the issues identified and had actually offered most of the settlement in advance of the Ombudsman's involvement.

In total the Ombudsman made 22 decisions on complaints by the Council. This number differs slightly from the number of complaints received as it includes complaints received in the previous year. Eight of these complaints were premature and of the other twelve decisions, six resulted in a finding of no maladministration

Although the Council met its target of responding to the Ombudsman enquiries within 28 days, responding on average in just 22.5 days, performance was down from the previous year (21.5)