Managing Complaints

The family you are supporting must be able to raise a complaint if they are unhappy with the actions of your group or a particular group member. We hope that any concerns or frustrations can be managed informally, through a frank conversation. However, there may be times when a family member does not feel that this has been resolved, and would like to raise a formal complaint.

For this reason, the Home Office require you to include a formal Complaints Policy with your application. Luckily, the Home Office have created a template Complaints Policy and Procedures that you can use, and Reset have helpfully translated this into Arabic.

Attached - Template Complaints Policy and Procedures in English (Home Office version)

Attached - Template Complaints Policy and Procedures in Arabic

You should give the family a copy of the formal policy in their native language, but we also recommend that you include a very clear summary of the procedures in their Welcome Information Pack which you can find in this module. And, it is very possible that the family you are supporting will be illiterate, so it is also important that you explain your Complaints Procedures in person during their first couple of weeks.

Complaints from Group Members

The Home Office template explicitly excludes complaints from group members. However, we have found it is important to have a process for this - whereby group members can raise a complaint or concern about the conduct of another group member, family member or the management of group the group.

The simplest way is to adapt the template, to make it cover all complaints. We have done that in our template below.

Code of Conduct

We recommend that you develop a Code of Conduct between the group & family members, which outlines what behaviour you can expect from one another (for example, to arrive on time to appointments; to treat each other with respect; etc.) This will give you something concrete to refer to, should there be a complaint about someone's behaviour. We look at developing a Code of Conduct in this module.