Complaints policy
Feedback, concerns, and complaints policy and procedure
Our feedback, concerns, and complaints procedure are open to everyone who receives or requests a service from Re-engage, as well as to people who have been given permission to act upon the behalf of someone who receives or requests a service from Re-engage. It is also open to volunteers, partners, suppliers, and other stakeholders. This policy is reviewed every two years.
Reasonable adjustments and alternative formats
Our aim is to make our policy easy to use and accessible for everyone. We will take steps to make any reasonable adjustments needed to access this policy, or any requests to provide responses in other formats.
If you are unable to contact us in writing because of a disability and need a reasonable adjustment, please call us on 020 7240 0630.
Feedback, concerns, and complaints policy statement
Re-engage:
- Is committed to providing high quality services to older people, volunteers, referrers, funders, other agencies, donors, and partners.
- Will take seriously any concern or complaint and will look into it promptly.
- Recognises that all stakeholders:
- Have the right to raise concerns or complaints about our services.
- Need access to clear information on how to voice complaints and concerns.
- Will deal with complaints in line with its suite of policies regarding confidentiality and data protection.
- Will keep a register of all complaints. The senior management team will review this quarterly, and the board will review the register annually.
Our feedback, concerns, and complaints procedure will be part of the process of monitoring the quality, effectiveness, and non-discriminatory nature of our work.
All staff, volunteers, and trustees are required to read, understand, and comply with this policy and its procedures.
Introduction
1. Re-engage strives for high standards in service delivery and welcomes feedback from individuals, users of our services, stakeholders, funding bodies and anyone who works with us, on all aspects of our services. Such feedback is invaluable in helping us evaluate and improve our work.
2. The objectives of this policy and procedures are to:
- Ensure that everyone knows how to give feedback, raise a concern, or make a complaint and how a complaint will be managed.
- Ensure that complaints are dealt with consistently, fairly, and sensitively within clear time frames.
- Provide individuals with a fair and effective way to complain about our work.
- Ensure that we monitor complaints to improve our services.
3. Re-engage will ensure that we:
- Listen carefully to complaints and treat complaints as confidential, where possible.
- Record, store and manage all complaints accurately and in accordance with the data protection act.
- Look into the complaint objectively and within a reasonable time period.
- Notify the complainant of the results of the investigation and any right of appeal.
- Respond to the complainant appropriately and in accordance with our suite of confidentiality policies.
- Review on an annual basis, the number of complaints received, and the outcomes and any actions taken.
This policy and procedure relate only to feedback, concerns, or complaints received about Re-engage and its services.
The difference between feedback, a concern, and a complaint
Feedback
If your complaint is not a service complaint, we will treat it as feedback. When you provide feedback, this information helps us to understand more about people’s views on our work or policies. This can help shape our future work, even if we are unable to take immediate action on the issue you raise. Some examples of things we will be treat as feedback are:
- Comment about the type of work that we do.
- Disagreement with our strategy or operational plan.
- Comments about our policies.
Concern
We will take informal concerns seriously to reduce the likelihood of a formal complaint developing.
Where issues are simple and we accept we have done something wrong, we can say sorry, try to put things right and / or learn from our mistake. Where this is an option, we will do this promptly and within fifteen working days.
Any member of staff can deal with a concern informally (including the person whose behaviour has been of concern) and offer an on-the-spot apology. If the concern is simple but the person who received the concern cannot manage it because they are unfamiliar with the issue, they will pass it on to someone who can as soon as possible.
If you are not happy with the response to your concern and / or you want to make a formal complaint, please follow the procedure below.
Complaint
A complaint is any expression of dissatisfaction by an individual, whether justified or not.
Matters about which people may wish to make a complaint or report (examples but not limited to):
- Service quality: if there has been an unacceptable standard of service or a mistake in the way the service was provided by Re-engage staff or volunteers.
- Integrity: if we have not acted within our charitable objects.
- Information security or privacy: if there has been any breach of the standards set out in our suite of confidentiality policies.
- Discrimination: this refers to discrimination of any nature, including based on ethnicity, place of origin, religion, gender, sexual orientation, age, or disability.
- Unethical conduct or behaviour.
- Violence or threat of violence.
- Substance abuse.
- Victimisation via bullying and intimidation by co-workers, being denied a promotion or being moved to a position with lower responsibility; dismissal from employment or being refused further contract work.
- Matters related to the well-being of people in the workplace.
Complaints procedure
Re-engage aims to settle all complaints quickly and satisfactorily by the member of staff who provides the service. If, however, a complainant wishes to formalise a complaint there are three stages to the complaints procedure:
- Stage one – the complaint
- Stage two – response
- Stage three – appeal
Stage one – complaint
Please try to be as clear as possible. This will help us understand your complaint and respond to you promptly. If a complaint is unclear, we may ask you for more information to help us to understand. If you do not provide the information we need when asked, we may not be able to help you.
If you want to make a complaint, then you should do so within six weeks of the issue arising.
The complaint can be written or if the individual prefers, they can tell someone at Re-engage, or someone else, who will use the Re-engage website to submit the complaint. Each complaint will be allocated a reference number and logged on the complaints register which is kept by the head of organisational effectiveness. We aim to send a full response within twenty working days of receiving your complaint. If we need to contact you for further clarification, or your advocacy agency for consent, the 20 working days will start from the date we get the information we need. If we are not able to meet this deadline, we will tell you and let you know when we are likely to be able to respond to your complaint.
Anyone who wants to make a complaint should telephone or email the person who provided the service, or their line manager. Alternatively, they can contact us via our website or by writing to Re-engage, 7 Bell Yard, London WC2A 2JR.
The complaint should include the complainant’s name and address, the nature and date of the complaint, and how they want to see it resolved.
Stage two – looking into, and responding to, the complaint
All complaints at this stage will be looked into by a member of the senior management team who does not directly manage the person against whom the complaint is made.
The member of the senior management team will provide a written response as speedily as circumstances permit, usually within 20 working days from the time of the complaint being received.
We will write to the complainant with the outcome of any investigation and, where appropriate, any recommendations / remedies made, such as reviewing of policies, staff development and training, or appropriate improvement to our services. We do, however, reserve the right to refuse to respond if we receive complaints which are threatening or abusive or if we receive repeated complaints from the same person about the same issue which have already been adjudicated upon or otherwise dealt with.
If you have made a complex complaint and if we need more time to investigate it, we will write to you and let you know the date by which we hope to be able to conclude our response.
Stage three – appeal
If you are not satisfied with our response you can appeal within 14 working days of the date of the outcome.
If you appeal, we will update our complaints register.
If you are unsatisfied with a response to your complaint, then you can appeal to our chief executive. If the complaint is about the chief executive, then the matter will referred to two of the charity’s trustees for further discussion.
The chief executive and / or trustees will acknowledge receipt of your intention to appeal against the original response or finding, review the original complaint and response, and then contact you to let you know that they are recommending one of the following:
- Upholding the action taken and the reason(s) why the action is being upheld set out in the response.
- Making changes to the recommendation / actions outlined in the response as soon as practicable.
You will be contacted in writing with this final response, and we will set out any further avenues open to you. If you are not satisfied with the result of the appeal, you can contact a solicitor or the Citizen’s Advice Bureau within one month of our response to your appeal.
Anonymous complaints
If we receive an anonymous complaint, we will add it to our register, but we may not be able to look into it in detail if we lack the information we need to pursue this.
Complaints and data protection
In order for us to process your complaint, Re-engage will hold personal data about you, which you provide, and which other people give in response to the complaint. We will hold this data securely and only use it to address the complaint. The identity of the person making the complaint will only be known to those who need to consider the complaint and will not be revealed to other people or made public. However, it may not be possible to preserve confidentiality in some circumstances, for example, where relevant legislation applies, or allegations are made which involve the conduct of third parties.
Re-engage will normally destroy complaints files in a secure manner six years after the complaint has been closed.
Monitoring
Complaints provide a useful source of information, alongside data provided by exit surveys, stakeholder surveys, user feedback and focus groups, will allow us to learn about the services we provide. To ensure we can learn from complaints the following data will be collected:
- Name and address.
- Name of person dealing with the complaint.
- Date of complaint and response.
- Nature of complaint.
- Action(s) taken / recommendations made in response to the complaint.
- Lessons learnt.
Complaints information will be considered on a regular basis by the senior management team and reported annually to Re-engage board of trustees. Wherever possible the data will be used to improve and develop the service.