Walsall Council took out injunction against abusive resident
Council lawyers took out a court injunction against a disgruntled resident who abused staff online, it has emerged.
Members of Walsall Council’s standards committee were presented with a report into how the authority deals with ‘unreasonable’ and ‘vexatious’ complaints it receives from taxpayers.
Tony Cox, head of legal and democratic services, said that on occasions they get people who will call the council persistently – even up to 100 times – with the same complaint, which puts a strain on resources.
But he said the council had only been forced to take extreme action on one occasion in the last year when an offender started being abusive towards officers who had been dealing with the complaint.
The authority went to court to secure an injunction, which was taken out to moderate the behaviour of the individual.
Mr Cox said most complainants were reasonable and implementing the vexatious policy was a last resort measure. Other measures that can be taken include sending warning letters.
He said: “Complaints are important to the council because it’s actually how you review and improve your services.
“However, there can be circumstances in which the manner of which people complain are actually a strain in terms of resources undertaken and that can be where people can contact the council on numerous occasions – on many times a 100 times actually complaining about the same issue.
“So the council therefore has a reasonable and unreasonable system of complaints procedure to actually deal with instances which are few and far between where members of the public complain in an inappropriate manner.
“There can be times where people complain so much the council has to take action. We have a duty of care to our employees.
“There has been one case in the last 12 months where we had to seek an injunction to restrain someone from abusing council officers online.
“This is one of the downsides of social media that we will see. That’s the only case where we had to take such dramatic action to date.”
The report added that the authority had seen a rise in complaints from people with mental health illness and special education needs.
Officers told members that they were working with the council’s SEND team and developing training to deal with such calls effectively.
