The Ombudsman's final decision
Summary: We will not investigate Mr X’s complaint about the Council’s bin staff not returning his emptied bin to outside his house, or about delay in the Council complaint process. There is no significant personal injustice caused to Mr X by the bin service issue to warrant us investigating. We do not investigate councils’ internal complaints processes where we are not investigating the core issue which gave rise to the complaint.
The complaint
Mr X lives in a property where he keeps his bins on the pavement. He complains: the Council’s bin staff fail to return his emptied bins to outside his property; the Council delayed in dealing with his complaint.
Mr X says not being able to find his bins means he cannot use them. He says he has been caused distress and inconvenience from having to complain, and Council delays in dealing with the complaint made this worse. Mr X wants £300 in compensation.
The Ombudsman’s role and powers
The Ombudsman investigates complaints about ‘maladministration’ and ‘service failure’, which we call ‘fault’. We must also consider whether any fault has had an adverse impact on the person making the complaint, which we call ‘injustice’. We provide a free service, but must use public money carefully. We do not start or may decide not to continue with an investigation if we decide: any fault has not caused injustice to the person who complained; or any injustice is not significant enough to justify our involvement.
(Local Government Act 1974, section 24A(6))
How I considered this complaint
I considered information from Mr X, and the Ombudsman’s Assessment Code.
My assessment
We recognise the bin staff leaving Mr X’s emptied bins outside a different address causes him frustration and inconvenience from having to identify and retrieve them so he can use them again. But that is not a significant enough personal injustice to him to justify the use of public money investigating this complaint.
Mr X says the Council delayed in responding to his complaint. We do not investigate complaints about councils’ internal complaint-handling processes in isolation where we are not investigating the core issue giving rise to the complaint. It is not a good use of our resources to do so. That limitation applies here, so we will not investigate this part of the complaint.
Final decision
We will not investigate Mr X’s complaint because: the bin service issue does not cause him a significant enough personal injustice to warrant us investigating; we do not investigate complaints about councils’ complaint-handling where we are not investigating the core issue which gave rise to the complaint.
Investigator's decision on behalf of the Ombudsman