More evidence of senior-officer misconduct in operating the Complaints procedure. This time, Lucy Taylor and Alison Reynolds get together to avoid dealing with complaints. I complained to Ms Taylor that senior officer Mark Wiltshire had commandeered a complaint against himself and “sat upon it”. She failed to deal with any of its content. No one reading her response would have had any idea what the complaint was about. She wrote: “I do not have anything further to add to the response you have received regarding the whole matter.” I had not received any response other than hers. She was the first person to respond, yet was responding by saying it had already been responded to! COMPLAINANTS BEWARE. This a regular TRICK, instead of dealing with your complaint they claim it has already been dealt with. She then said her colleague Mr O’Donnell had told me that, subject to a response from the Local Government Ombudsman, the Council would consider the matter closed and regard me as a “vexatious complainant”. The complaint with which the LGO was dealing involved an entirely different matter. And the idea that I could be considered as vexatious when my complaint was still with her at stage one and she had made no attempt to deal with it was preposterous. It was my right under Council procedure to ask for the complaint to be escalated to stage 2. But, on the basis of this irrelevant nonsense, concerning the unknown outcome of a future event, she refused to escalate the complaint to stage two, with no reason given. I made a complaint about her behaviour to the Director of Customer Services, Alison Reynolds. Instead of dealing with the issues I raised, she merely said she agreed with Taylor in respect of every one of them, worthless unsupported opinion. In respect of Taylor’s suggestion that I was a vexatious complainant she wrote “I consider Lucy Taylors response appropriate and reasonable.” Before a person can be accused of being vexatious, their complaint has to have run its full course in the Council’s complaints procedure and they must then have repeated the complaint persistently. None of this applied. I had not even been told why I was being accused.DIRTY TRICK TWO: suggesting the complainant is a vexatious complainant – without following the rules in doing so. In respect of the complaint against Wiltshire, Reynolds wrote – can’t you guess? – it had already been dealt with by Ms Harris, the Council’s Director of Legal Services . A little problem with that. The email from Ms Harris dealt with a totally unrelated matter and was written BEFORE I made the complaint that Wiltshire had sat upon a complaint against himself. It is difficult to understand how an email sent before a complaint was made can have dealt with the complaint. Ms Reynolds has a serious calendar problem. So, on top of the dirty tricks, a complainant has to contend with STUPIDITY. There you have them. The Council’s close-harmony duo. You have heard of the Golden Girls. You have heard of the Cheeky Girls. Meet Lucy and Alison, the Sneaky Girls.“Sneaky” is too nice a word, but it rhymes. Behaviour such as theirs brings the Council into disrepute. Hopefully, what I have written gives an idea of the quality of professional service you can expect when you make a complaint and the moral character of the officers who may deal with it. This is a moral matter. Next time: a complaint manages to reach stage three and is dealt with – oh dear – CEO Paul Najsarek
Andrew Farmer ● 2629d