Thank you for your complaint about a councillor

Thank you for your complaint that a Councillor has breached their authority’s Code of Conduct for Members.  A formal acknowledgement letter will be issued to you within a week.

We will now consider your complaint and we will let you know in due course whether the Ombudsman intends to investigate it.  You may wish to consider  our factsheet, ‘Code of Conduct – What we do when we get your complaint’, which explains our complaint and review procedures.

Please be aware that the disclosure of details of this complaint to the local press or media may prejudice any investigation by the Ombudsman.  If you are also a Councillor, such disclosure may also amount to a breach of the Code of Conduct.

You are therefore requested not to discuss this complaint with anyone other than your legal or other adviser during the course of any investigation.  However, the details of the complaint, including the outcome, may be publicly available following the conclusion of the Ombudsman’s assessment and/or any investigation.

Please also note that the Member you complained about will only be notified of your complaint once the Ombudsman has decided whether or not it will be investigated.

It is best if you contact us by email whenever possible.  If you are waiting for an email from us and have not received it, please check your junk or spam emails first as emails can go there.

In line with our Service Standards, we will communicate effectively with you.  Our ‘Communicating with you about your complaint’ information sheet explains how we will communicate with you, and what you can expect from us.

We also ask that you treat us politely and with respect and dignity.  Our expectations for how you communicate with us are explained in our information sheet.

We want to make it easy for everyone to use our services.  We can change the way we communicate with you depending on your needs.  Please let us know what your needs are, and we will do our best to help.

We have a legal responsibility to look into complaints about councillors in Wales.  When we look into your complaint we collect information about you.  We may also need to collect information about you from others.

We hold information about you in a case record on our complaints database, which is kept for 10 years from the date we close the complaint.  We then delete your personal information from the case record leaving behind basic information about the complaint.  We need this basic information to run reports from the database so we can study complaint trends.

However you wish to communicate with us we take steps to protect your information.  The Privacy Notice on our website tells you more about how we use your personal information – https://www.ombudsman.wales/privacy-notice/.  If you would like a paper copy please let me know.

We want to make sure that people using our service are treated equally and that we do not unknowingly discriminate against anyone.  We also respect our duties under the Equality Act 2010.  We invite you to fill in our equality monitoring survey which can be found at https://uk.surveymonkey.com/r/ZDDHB96.  This helps us gather equality information which we use to look for areas for improvement, including how we can reduce any barriers to access.  The survey takes about 3 minutes to complete.  If you would like a paper copy, please let us know. 

Please let us know if you want the equality survey in a different format – this might be in large print or in another language.  We can also arrange to complete this survey with you over the phone.  If you want any of these options, please contact us on 0300 790 0203.

Your complaint will not be affected if you do or do not complete the survey.  Your response will not be seen by any member of staff who assesses or investigates your complaint.

Details about how we process your equality information are in our Privacy Notice.  The online equality survey is run by SurveyMonkey, and their Privacy Notice is available on their website.