TOUGHER steps may have to be considered to deal with a small number of persistent and vexatious complaints to Dorset Council.

Councillors have told how some have their inboxes are swamped with angry emails, almost on a daily basis, usually by one person, of just a small number of people.

In the past the police have been called in to try and stem the tide of messages from individuals when it reaches the level of harassment.

Senior council officer Anthony Bygrave, whose team deals with complaints, told a council scrutiny committee that there may have been times when the authority had not been brave enough in tackling vexatious complainers head on.

Cllr David Shawtell suggested that there might be occasions to again call on the police for help if people persisted in making the same complaint time after time and were obviously unlikely to stop, even though a response had been given.

“The trouble is it doesn’t quieten down, it just places it in another direction… perhaps we just have to suffer it because of who we are,” he said.

Mr Bygrave said that Dorset was no different from other authorities in seeing a big increase in the number of people who wanted to complain, suggesting there had been a cultural change over the Covid period.

But he said that the council could be proud of its record with very few complaints dealt with on a formal level by the Local Government Ombudsman being accepted as maladministration.

He said that all complaints were treated as a way of learning lessons and making improvements to services.

Mr Bygrave rejected a comment from Cllr David Tooke that officers being allowed to decide the difference between a formal and an informal complaint, smacked of “marking your own homework” saying that there were processes in place to stop that happening.

The number of complaints recorded by the council has risen 14% year on year -  and is double the amount when compared to the year before.

The latest figures show 1,400 complaints across all areas of the council in 2021-22 – although only 554 of these were fully considered formally, with 862 resolved informally.

Only 8% of the total complaints made were considered fully justified with 9% partly justified, a similar percentage to the previous year.

The authority also recorded 380 expressions of thanks across its various directorates, when compared to the previous Covid year.

Said the report: “this is still something for Dorset Council to celebrate and hopefully presents a more balanced report on service perceptions. It is clear in 2021-22 that people were more likely to voice complaints, than compliment a job well done.”