How we work
Stage 1 - Assistance
When you get in touch with us to complain about one of the organisations that we investigate, your first point of contact is with our Assistance Team.
The Assistance Team's main roles are to:
- Ensure that the organisation has had the opportunity to consider your complaint fully.
- Decide if your complaint concerns a matter within our remit for investigation.
We cannot consider your complaint until it has gone through the organisations' own complaints procedure. If the organisation has not had the opportunity to deal with your complaint fully, we will ask them to do so. We will tell you what we have done and say which office will be replying to you.
At this stage, many complaints are resolved successfully by the organisations without further need for our involvement. If, however, you remain dissatisfied after the organisation has considered your complaint fully, you can ask us to investigate. We expect you to bring your complaint to us within six months of your final reply from the organisation.
If your complaint has already been through the organisations' procedures and is about a matter that we can investigate, the Assistance Team will ask the organisation to provide us with information about their handling of your case. We will consider carefully what information we need in order to investigate each individual complaint satisfactorily.
We try to deal with complaints in the order that they arrive in the office. This means that we are not always able to deal with your complaint immediately.
Our contact details appear prominently in many of the leaflets and publications produced by the organisations. This means that the Assistance Team often receives general enquiries from members of the public. For example, we sometimes receive calls from people who are frustrated that they cannot get through on the telephone to HMRC's tax credit helpline. Unfortunately, we do not have the resources to provide general advice to people about their particular circumstances.