How to make a complaint
If you are unhappy with a council service, you can make a complaint. We will take your concerns seriously and work with you to put things right.
If you are already dealing with a council officer, or you know which service to contact, you may want to discuss your issue by telephone. Some things can be fixed quickly at an informal stage. If you are not sure about which part of the council is responsible, please use our A to Z to find the relevant information or telephone the switchboard on 020 8825 5000.
You do not have to use the word “complaint” - if you tell us you are unhappy, we will treat it as a complaint.
Make a complaint online
The quickest way to make sure your complaint is dealt with is to raise it on My Account. My Account gives you the ability to track your complaint and monitor its progress.
Before you start
Not all issues can be dealt with by our formal complaints procedure.
Do not complete this form:
- if you would like to report a missed collection
- if a street light has stopped working
- if a vehicle has been abandoned on your street
- if you want to dispute a parking ticket or penalty charge notice (PCN)
- if you are a council tenant and your complaint is regarding how we dealt with a matter relating to your home
- if you want to appeal a school's decision because your child has been refused a place
- if you want to make a complaint about your child’s school
- if you want to complete a SEND appeal
- to report a repair to a council property
- to ask a question about council tax
- to request a bulky items collection or order a bin, box or bag
- to report a problem with a tree
- to complain about a councillor
- to complain about data protection
- if your complaint relates to an issue that is currently subject to formal legal proceedings (for example, a disrepair claim issued in court) and is not at the pre-action stage
What to include
To help us investigate, please tell us:
- what happened
- when it happened
- how it has affected you
- what you would like us to do to put things right
If you are not sure, do not worry — we will help you.
Uploading supporting documents
We may ask you to upload some documents. For example: Documents or photographs relating to the complaint.Accepted file types: Word (docx), Acrobat (pdf), Excel (xlsx), Plain text (txt)
- Zip files can't be uploaded
- we also accept photos taken on phones and tablets and the following image file types - jpeg, gif, png
- there is a maximum individual file size per document of 50MB
What happens next
We follow a 2-stage complaints process:
Stage 1
- Your complaint will be acknowledged within 5 working days and sent to the relevant service area to review.
- Once we investigate your complaint, we will send you a response explaining our findings.
- We aim to respond within 10 working days of the complaint being acknowledged.
Stage 2
If you are not happy with the stage 1 response you can ask for a final review of your complaint at stage 2. Please tell us the parts of the response you are unhappy with and the desired outcome.
Your complaint will be acknowledged within 5 working days and we aim to respond within 20 working days of the complaint being acknowledged.
If your complaint is complex, we may take longer - but we will explain why and keep you updated.
These timescales follow national complaint handling standards.
We will keep you informed and let you know if anything changes. You can track the progress of your complaint in My Account.
Support with making a complaint
We want to make this process easy and accessible.
You can:
- ask someone to complain on your behalf (with your permission)
- request information in another format or language
- get help completing your complaint
Please contact us if you need support.