Make a complaint

When to complain

Your complaints can help us to improve the services we provide to everyone. Please tell us if we have:

• failed to do something we should have done
• performed a service badly
• treated you badly or discourteously

Some types of complaint need to be submitted differently:

Adult social care and children’s social care

By law, we have to follow a different process for social care complaints:

• make a complaint about adult social care
• email the social care team direct to make a complaint about children's social care.

Schools and education

If your concern is about a school or education, you should contact the school and follow their procedure. There is guidance on the government's website that you may find helpful:

• how to complain about a school
• how to complain about a school’s special educational needs (SEN) support
• guidance about how the Education and Skills Funding Agency (ESFA) handles complaints about academies

Councillors

There's a different process if you want to complain about an elected member of the council.

Report a problem or make an appeal

We can fix some problems without going through the complaints procedure. You can report common problems (for example, potholes and fly-tipping) using our online reporting forms. 

You can also:

• disagree with a Housing Benefit or council tax reduction (CTR) decision
• appeal against a school admission decision
• challenge a penalty charge notice (PCN)

How to complain

You'll need to sign in to your MyAccount to make a complaint.

You'll have the option to upload photographs or documents to support your complaint.

Any data collected as part of the application will be used in accordance with data protection law and the UK GDPR. Find out more about how we process your data.

If you're unable to complete the online form, you can:

• phone the customer experience centre and we will take you through the process
• go to a Walsall Connected hub, where we'll show you how to self-serve online
• write to us instead

What happens next?

Stage 1

First, we’ll acknowledge your complaint when we receive it. We’ll log it within five working days and make sure it goes to the right service so they can take action.

We’ll then investigate your complaint. You can expect a full response within 10 working days of confirmation of receipt. If we need more time to respond, we will let you know.

Stage 2

If you are unhappy with our response, you can contact us using your online account, or by phone. We will acknowledge and log this within five working days. 

A senior officer will review the matter and make sure the initial investigation was carried out properly. We will send a full response within 20 working days.

Local Government Ombudsman

After our stage 2 response, if you are still unhappy and want to take your complaint further, you can contact the Local Government Ombudsman.