Make a complaint or appeal

1 Overview

West Sussex County Council (WSCC) is absolutely committed to responding to customers in a timely manner. We recognise the importance for our customers of a prompt resolution if you want to complain.

As WSCC continues to adapt to presenting COVID-19 pressures, there may be times when a complaint is not responded to within the published timescales.

Every upheld complaint is examined for ways that we can improve our service. We know that we can always improve and we welcome your feedback. You can make comments or suggestions, but if you decide to complain, you can be sure that we will deal with you fairly and try to learn from what you tell us.

The best way to get something sorted out is to talk or email to the person you dealt with, or their line manager. They will always try to resolve matters without you having to go through a formal process.

If you don't know how to contact them, or you don't want to discuss your concerns with anybody, you can log your complaint.

2 What you can expect

Sometimes we will treat the problem as a complaint; at other times we may use a different way to resolve things such as our safeguarding procedures:

Adults' safeguarding procedures (unless you are challenging a decision, in which case we might use a separate appeals process to deal with it).
Children's safeguarding procedures, which look into problems when children are at risk of harm.

If you are challenging a decision rather than complaining about a service or a member of staff, we may use one of our appeals processes.

Whichever way we are going to deal with the problem, if we are not using a complaints procedure we will give you a full explanation of what we are doing and why.

3 Complaints procedures

Complaints are dealt with under one of three Council procedures:

Corporate
Adults' social care
Children’s social care.

The three complaints procedures vary slightly, but each one means that you will receive a response from the manager responsible for the service, hopefully within ten working days but certainly within 20 working days.

It is possible that they will contact you to discuss your complaint before they send the response. The response will tell you what procedure is being used and the next steps are if you are still unhappy.

We recognise that when something seems to have gone wrong, it can be a stressful time for you. We do ask that you remain polite when dealing with our staff, give us a reasonable amount of time to try to sort things out for you and that you do your best to follow the published procedures. If you do not, we may have to apply our procedures for unreasonably persistent complainants or unacceptable behaviour (see supporting documents).

Supporting documents

4 Appealing against decisions

Highways decisions

If you have applied to WSCC for permission for something to do with a highway and permission was not given, you have the right to appeal.

Appeals against decisions by the Highway Authority (PDF, 73KB)

Adults' decisions

If you are challenging an adults' social care decision, we may use our appeals process.

School admissions

There is a separate statutory process for making an admissions appeal.

5 If you need help to make your complaint

If you would like someone else to deal with the complaint on your behalf, or to support you when you make your complaint, this is fine. We will check with you that you are aware of the complaint and that you agree with it before proceeding.

If you are an adult, you can find details about advocacy and organisations who might help on our Connect to Support site.

If you are a child or a care leaver you can find details about advocacy on our Your Space site.