Annual Customer Complaints and Compliments Report: 2024 to 2025

Next week, Wednesday 23 July, Cabinet will be presented with our Annual Customer Complaints and Compliments Report.

The report provides an overview of complaints and compliments received by the council since 1 April 2024 to 31 March 2025.

At Barnsley Council we're committed to putting our customers first. Complaints and compliments help our services to identify positive experiences and areas for improvement. Key highlights from this report includes:

• We’ve received a total of 232 customer compliments.
• A total of 489 customer complaints were registered, with 2 being withdrawn, bringing the total to 487.
• Most complaints were resolved at the early resolution stage, with 251 being considered at this stage and 238 requiring formal investigation.
• 96% of complaints met their statutory and procedural timescale for completion at all stages in the process.
• The outcomes from complaints showed 180 cases being upheld, 115 partially upheld, 139 not upheld, 16 inconclusive, and 37 pending completions.
• We’ve recorded 25 contacts from the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman’s office, with 9 requiring formal investigation.

We will always work hard to understand and learn from customer feedback to improve our services. This includes:

• Collaborating with services to review how they can use the information from complaints to learn and improve service delivery.
• Capturing data on contacts into the Customer Resolution Team to identify trends and improve customer experience.
• Offering complaints training to services.
• Continuing to use information identified from complaints and provided by the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman to improve and develop our processes and procedures.

Councillor Robert Frost, Cabinet Spokesperson for Core Services, said: “At Barnsley Council, our teams work together with our communities to make Barnsley a place of possibilities. We’re dedicated to listening to feedback and learning from people’s experiences. I’m pleased to see that we’re resolving even more complaints within agreed timescales, from 94% in the last annual report to 96% in the latest report.

Please tell us when you think we’ve done a good job and when you think that we can do better. You can find more information about how to share your compliments and complaints on our website.”

The full Cabinet report is available on our website.