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Housing compliments, complaints & suggestions

Housing compliments, complaints & suggestions

Find out how to complain or compliment the council about a service.

Make a general compliment, complaint or suggestion

This page provides information should you wish to make a complaint, compliment or suggestion about the council or a service.

We want to provide you with the best possible service. To help, we're open to feedback which is used to make improvements.

If we are doing something well, please let us know so we can pass this on to our employees. If there is something you are unhappy with, we want to know so we can put things right and learn from it.

If you are contacting the council for the first time, to report a problem or book a service (such as fixing a pothole or tree maintenance), you can do this online without registering a formal complaint:

Please click below to report a problem to us:

Please select one of the below options to contact us:

Members Complaints

Make a complaint

Send us a compliment

Comments and suggestions

Comments & suggestions

If you would like to contact us to make a general comment or suggestion about how we could improve or develop our services, we would love to hear from you. Make a comment or suggestion online here Your comment or suggestion will be passed on to the relevant person(s) and if you would like us to, we will get back in touch within 15 working days.

Compliments

Thank you for taking the time to tell us what we've done well. We really appreciate compliments, as it allows employees to be recognised for their work and helps us to keep improving services. Submit a compliment online here Your compliment will be passed to the relevant employee or team so your feedback can be shared with the right people.

Your compliment will be used to help us celebrate what our teams have done well and to encourage high-quality services across the council.

If you would like us to, we will get back in touch within 15 working days.

Complaints

We're sorry you are unhappy about the actions, or lack of action, from the council. We want to hear about your experience so we can put things right and learn from what has happened. Make a complaint online here For information on the process for complaints management, please refer to this diagram. Corporate Feedback Process (Complaints)

Types of complaints

We want to make sure the right person or team deals with your complaint as quickly as possible and so we have specific processes in place for dealing with different types of complaints:

Complaints in relation to schools

For complaints in relation to schools in Northumberland:

For complaints in relation to social care for children

For complaints in relation to social care for adults, you should:

If you wish to complain about the conduct of an elected member of the council, you must complete a complaints form and return it to us by either post or email. Please return your completed form, together with any supporting documentation to:

The Monitoring Officer
Legal Services Unit
Northumberland County Council
County Hall
Morpeth
Northumberland
NE61 2EF

Email: monitoringofficer@northumberland.gov.uk

Complaint about members

The member's code of conduct is part of the county council constitution. To view the members' code of conduct, click here. To assist you in making a complaint, we have also prepared an indicative flowchart that sets out how the process works for handling complaints about elected members.

Unhappy with a response?

If we have already responded to your complaint, but you are unhappy with the decision or outcome, you can ask us to look at your complaint again.

If you would like to ask us to look at your complaint again, the quickest way to do this is by filling in our online form by clicking here: Re-submit a complaint online here Alternatively, you can contact the council's complaints team:

Once we receive your request, we'll look again at the original complaint and the response. We will write to you with the results of our investigation within 20 working days.

What if I am still unhappy?

Should you remain unhappy with the response which you receive, you have the right to contact the local government and social care ombudsman at:

The Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman
PO Box 4771
Coventry
CV4 0EH

Should you remain unhappy with the Stage 2 response you receive from Housing Services, you have the right to contact the housing ombudsman at:

The Housing Ombudsman's Service
PO Box 1484
Unit D
Preston
PR2 0ET

The Housing Ombudsman's Complaint Handling Code

The Housing Ombudsman launched a new code about the way landlords handle complaints. It's called The Housing Ombudsman's Complaint Handling Code. The code helps us to resolve complaints made to Housing Services quickly. It also helps us to learn from complaints and use this learning to drive service improvements.

We've recently completed a self-assessment against the code of how we handle complaints. You can find our assessment here. We'll complete a new self-assessment every year too. We've also completed an Annual Complaints Report too. You can find our Annual Complaints Report here. Northumberland County Council's Housing Assurance Board have written a response to The Housing Services Annual Complaints Report for 2023 - 2024, you can find the Assurance Board's response here.

Council housing tenants can help to shape and influence services and have formed a complaints monitoring group to make sure they learn and improve service delivery. You can find the Complaint Monitoring Group December update here.

Tenant Satisfaction

The Regulator of Social Housing has created a new system for assessing how well social housing landlords in England are doing at providing good quality homes and services.

This will involve a set of tenant satisfaction measures that social housing landlords must report on. People will be able to use these measures to understand how well landlords are doing. We must survey our tenants every year and publish the findings.

Last updated on 06/06/2025 15:35