Charter and customer care

The aim of our Charter is to specify comprehensively the standards that we are striving to achieve.

All areas of our service have particular standards applied to them, and you can expect us to meet those standards. This is in addition to your right to expect us to be courteous and efficient at all times.

Our aims are summarized in our mission statement:-

It is our aim to improve the health, safety, security and welfare of the borough's residents, visitors and business community.

To help us achieve this we:

• Work within the legal framework and apply the law fairly
• Make the service accessible
• Remain responsive to customer needs
• Deal with customers with honesty and integrity
• Work in partnership with groups to achieve our objectives
• Are always self critical
• Use the resources available to the maximum benefit of our customers
• Train and develop our staff to ensure their effectiveness
• Treat our staff and customers equally regardless of race, colour, nationality, ethnic origin, sex, marital status, disability or age.

Download a full copy of the charter which details all our standards.

Key customer care standards

We will deal with urgent matters on either the day that you report them to us or the next working day. On other matters we will start investigating your complaint within two working days.

If you send us a letter, fax or email we will reply to you with a full response within 10 working days. In some cases we may not be able to provide you with a full answer within 10 working days because of the nature of the matter under investigation. In these cases we will give you as much information as we can in 10 days and let you have a full reply as soon as possible thereafter.

When you telephone we aim to answer within 5 rings