Whitehorse Complaints and Feedback Policy

Thank you for providing your feedback. This consultation has concluded on 24 October 2021.

Thank you to everyone who responded to our survey and participated in the workshops.

Using the Local Government Act 2020, the Victorian Ombudsman’s recommendations and your feedback we created the Whitehorse Complaints and Feedback Policy. On the 13th of December 2021 Councillors have recommended this policy for adoption. Our new policy aims to describe:

1. how to give feedback or make complaints,
2. what happens after you give feedback
3. and what you can expect.

Please, click here to access our new Whitehorse Complaints and Feedback Policy.

For three weeks in October, we led a consultation on the re-development of our complaints and feedback policy. The consultation process included:

• workshops with staff, Councillors and community members
• 1:1 interviews with targeted community representatives; and
• an online survey on its Your Say Whitehorse engagement platform.

We identified that the main reason to provide feedback is a hope that “it would make a difference” in the quality of the Council's services. Participants highlighted four major themes for improvement:

• Access and customer service channels – no wrong door approach will make it easy. As part of our new Policy, people will be able to make verbal complaints
• Acknowledgements – an early feedback acknowledgement is essential for a satisfactory resolution This has led to the introduction of a 2-day acknowledgement service standard
• What’s important to people – a human-centred approach to service. We recognise that it’s very important to demonstrate that we’ve really listened carefully to complaints and to tell our community when we’ve made service improvements based on feedback
• Resolution. Our new policy includes a 4-tier Resolution Model which aligns with the Victorian Ombudsman’s recommendations and your feedback.

We continue working to implement this new policy and ensure our customers get a consistently great experience, whichever part of Council they’re dealing with.

Please refer to the Community Engagement Report for more information (see the 'Documents' library on the right hand side of this page).

Thank you!

We are updating our Whitehorse Complaints and Feedback Policy and procedures. Our new policy will describe how to give feedback or make complaints, what happens after you give feedback and what you can expect.

We want to know what’s important to you when making a complaint or providing feedback. Our current policy is linked here in case you want to review it. Our new policy will be based on:

• The requirements of the Local Government Act 2020
• Guidance provided by the Victorian Ombudsman
• Feedback from our community, staff and Councillors.