Decision Report 201205406

Summary

Ms C, who is a solicitor, complained on behalf of her clients (Mr and Mrs A) that the council did not reasonably investigate reports of antisocial behaviour by a neighbour, who is a council tenant, and about whom there had been many other complaints. Ms C wrote to the council several times, then contact stopped for a year, by the end of which Mr and Mrs A had moved. When Ms C first contacted us over a year after that, we told her that she would first need to complain through the council’s complaints procedures. She did so, and then complained again to us. We suspended our consideration of the complaint to allow further information to be supplied, explaining to Ms C that we could normally only look at a complaint about something that had happened, or that she had found out about, within the last twelve months. When we re-opened her complaint, we found we were effectively restricted to looking into matters for about a seven month period, until before Mr and Mrs A moved out. We considered the council’s actions during that period, and found that they had issued a final warning to the tenant. Our investigation did not find this unreasonable.