More than 5,000 complaints were put in over the past year – a slight fall on the previous year
Author: Roland Sebestyen, Local Democracy Reporting ServicePublished 5th Sep 2025
Last updated 5th Sep 2025
According to an annual report, Sheffield City Council received more than 5,000 complaints over the last year which is a little bit less than the previous year.
Sheffield Council’s strategy and resources committee will next week (September 10) discuss the Annual Corporate Performance Complaint Report.
A document with the figures has already been published, and based on the report the council received a total of 5,112 complaints between April 1, 2024 and March 31, 2025, if strategic partners were excluded.
If these partners – Amey and Veolia – were included, the total number of complaints was 7,899.
However, both of these numbers are showing a downward trend compared with the previous years.
In 2023/24 and 2022/23 the overall complaint volumes (including the strategic partners) were 8,364 and 9,514, respectively.
When excluding the partners, these numbers were 5,694 in 2023/24 and 6,336 in 2022/23.
While the report included the complaints that went through the service areas of Adults Wellbeing & Care Services, Children’s Services, City Futures, Neighbourhoods, Public Health & Integrated Commissioning, and Strategic Support Services, complaints regarding Adult and Children’s Social Care are processed and monitored under specific statutory frameworks.
The service area where the most complaints were received last year was Neighbourhoods (4,012).
The report added the total number of corporate complaints responded to in 2024-25 was 7692 (including strategic partners).
The report said: “92.8pc (7142/7692) were responded to at Stage 1(investigation), compared with 96.6pc in the previous year.
“4.8pc (372/7692) were responded to at Stage 2 (investigation review), compared with 2pc in the previous year.
“1.4pc (108/7692) were rejected/not accepted as a complaint; and 0.9pc (70/7692) were withdrawn before an investigation could commence. This compares with 0.6pc rejected and 0.8% withdrawn in the previous year.”
Council members will discuss more of these at 2pm next Wednesday (September 10) at Sheffield Town Hall.