Councillors will carry out an investigation following a rise in complaints against their authority.

Stoke-on-Trent City Council received 1,805 'stage one' complaints last year, up from 1,199 in 2022/23, while the number of cases escalated to 'stage two' rose from 95 to 167.

Officers say that much of this increase has been due to housing disrepair claims being logged as complaints – a rise in 'no win, no fee' solicitors targeting council tenants has been a recent national trend.

And while the overall number of complaints to the city council has risen over the last two years, the number of cases being referred to the Local Government Ombudsman has fallen.

Members of the strategy and resources scrutiny committee agreed to carry out a piece of work looking into the nature of the complaints to see how the number can be reduced.

Committee chair Dan Jellyman asked for the complaints figures to be broken down by department and service area in order to better understand the issue.

He said: "If we can see that improvements can be made in a particular area, we can get the director in and ask them how they're going to reduce the number of complaints. The fact that people are complaining means there is officer time that could be better spent delivering the service."

Monitoring officer and director of customer services James Doble told the committee that he would welcome greater scrutiny on complaints. He said: "As officers we really welcome this. We think it's really helpful, and we're supportive of you doing so. Only by looking at complaints can we close the loop on learning.

"I certainly think there's a correlation between the council's financial position and the complaints that we get in, in terms of expectations not being met by the resources that we have.

"I want to make sure that departments are learning from their mistakes, and I need help from elected members in doing so."

Officer Jacqueline Holdcroft said that in addition to the increase in housing disrepair claims, the council was also seeing a lot of complaints relating to anti-social behaviour, which can be 'difficult to resolve'.

But the committee heard that the council had improved the way it handled complaints, with the relevant head of service now dealing with stage one complaints, with the relevant director dealing with stage two complaints. This had resulted in fewer cases being escalated from stage two to the ombudsman.

Ms Holdcroft said: "What is interesting is that since we've done this report we've had the annual review letter from the ombudsman, and the number of complaints that have been escalated to the ombudsman has actually reduced.

"So we are getting it right. Compared to similar authorities, we've got a higher percentage of complaints that are remedied at stage one or stage two."

Committee member Adrian Knapper suggested that it would also be useful for the committee to consider compliments received by the council, in addition to the complaints.