THE number of complaints about Staffordshire County Council’s services has increased – and the amount of queries from MPs also rose.
The authority areas most complained about included lighting, highways maintenance, waste and transport operations, a report has revealed.
But not all concerns identified by residents as “complaints” were classed as such by the county council – and issues such as highways defects, parking problems or rights of way concerns were referred to the authority’s online reporting systems.
The annual corporate complaints report, which covers the period between 1st April 2023 and 31st March 2024 and was presented to the corporate overview and scrutiny committee, does not include details of complaints about children’s or adult social care services, which are covered by separate documents.
The council’s complaints manager Kate Bullivant said:
“We’ve had an 8.5% increase in formal complaints – from 140 to 152. If you think about the size of the local authority and the amount of services we provide, that’s a very good number of complaints coming in.
“A lot of people feel they are making a complaint – such as they have got a pothole – but we have to go back and respectfully tell them it’s a request for service. We are really grateful for people highlighting concerns about our roads and the decision has been made that we report that digitally.
“It’s very important that we learn from the complaints that have come in. We ensure these are followed through with an action plan – we may not uphold the complaint but we learn from everything that comes into us.
“The final stage of the corporate complaints process is the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman. We work with the ombudsman through all our processes and they produce an annual letter.
“We’ve been brought to task for not remedying recommendations in a timely manner – this is mainly with our special educational needs and disabilities team and families.
“We’re working with them to ensure that we provide a timely response in respect of recommendations.”
MP enquiries to the council went up by 23.6% to 1,021 for the year, the committee was told.
Cllr Alan White, leader of the council, said:
“The number of complaints we have received has increased and the source of many of those complaints is Members of Parliament.
“It is not surprising in the run-up to an election that MPs become much more active in making themselves known by saying to constituents ‘don’t worry it, I’ll complain on your behalf’.
“The ideal for this would be to cut out the person in the middle and encourage residents to come straight to the council to try and get a resolution. But for reasons everyone round the table who is an elected member will understand, they feel the benefit of representing their constituents.
“When we see next year’s report we will just see more and more of this. We’re seeing MPs become much more locally-orientated. I would encourage them to say to their constituents get in touch with your local councillor – this can be resolved pretty quickly at a lower level.
“The idea you can bypass the system by doing a complaint to the MP is something I suppose is a seductive notion for an MP. But actually it doesn’t particularly help the system to deal with complaints in an expedient fashion.
“There are some particularly difficult cases we have to deal with. And we are able to resolve many of them in a timely and very professional fashion, despite the fact that some of the complainants get particularly unprofessional and irate in the process of presenting their complaints, sometimes in an ill-advised fashion.”
