Customer feedback and complaints
We want to hear about your experience with us. Complaints, compliments and comments all help us to improve the services we provide to our customers.
How to say thank you
Our teams of dedicated people work every day with passion and purpose to serve the people of Dacorum. If you have experienced excellent customer service, please let us know so that we can recognise the achievements of our colleagues. To send a compliment about a staff member or team, please send an email to compliments@dacorum.gov.uk.
Report a problem to us
You can report a problem with a specific council service using our online forms. This is different to making a complaint but will help us resolve the issue faster:
Make a complaint
Unfortunately, despite our best efforts, things do occasionally go wrong. Our 
Complaints Policy (PDF 739KB) sets out how we deal with complaints.
In these circumstances, we want to make it as simple and quick as possible for you to raise concerns with us. We will investigate all the complaints we receive and respond as quickly as possible, as well as learn from your feedback.
It is helpful if you raise your issue with us as soon as possible, to help enable a quick resolution. We will only accept complaints related to issues that happened more than six months ago in exceptional circumstances.
We will acknowledge your complaint within five working days of receipt and explain how we plan to investigate it. We will also let you know if we cannot deal with your complaint under our policy.
Start your complaint
You can write to or telephone us to make a complaint. Our Contact us page has details of our telephone number and postal address.
Having someone to speak on your behalf is known as advocacy. Find out more about getting advocacy support.
Report a problem to Hertfordshire County Council
Hertfordshire County Council (HCC) is responsible for:
- Maintenance of roads and street lighting
- Adult social care
- Children’s services and education
Please visit the HCC website to report an issue or make a complaint.
Make an appeal
Some services have a separate appeal process if you think we have made the wrong decision. For these services, you should follow the appeals process instead of making a complaint. We have dedicated web pages that cover the appeals processes:
How we deal with your complaint
Stage One - Investigating and resolving your complaint
We will talk to you about how best to investigate and address your concerns.
Usually, we will investigate within 10 working days. However, occasionally we might need to do a more complex investigation, and this will take longer. In exceptional circumstances, we will contact you to get your agreement to further extend the timescale.
When we respond to you, we will tell you what we have found, and we will explain any changes we make. We will apologise if we have got it wrong and try to put this right.
Stage Two - Internal review
If you are dissatisfied with our response or we have not responded to all the concerns you raised, you can escalate your complaint to Stage Two of the process by contacting us within 28 calendar days from receipt of our response. You will need to provide an explanation of why and how the initial response failed to fully address your concerns, and evidence of the aspects of the complaint that were not fully addressed. The complaint will be given to a senior officer from a different department to review.
We will talk to you about how best to review and address your outstanding concerns.
Usually, we will review and respond to your case within 20 working days.
Role of the Housing and Local Government Ombudsmen
If you are not satisfied with the outcome of our two-stage process, The Local Government and Housing Ombudsmen look at individual complaints about councils and other organisations providing local public services.
When we respond to your complaint, we will provide details of how to contact the Ombudsmen and you can find further details of their responsibilities and processes on their websites:
Give us feedback about our services
If you would like to give us feedback on our services or policies, you can email feedback@dacorum.gov.uk. We will consider and respond to any feedback we receive.
