Complaints

1. What we can help with

• Something on this site that is broken, unusable or unclear.
• An advert that is misleading, out of date, or not what it claims to be.
• An advert that asks you for money, or leads to someone asking you for money.
• Emails you did not ask for, or emails that carried on after you unsubscribed.
• Anything about how we handled your data.
• How we treated you, or how long we took.

2. How to complain

Email us. Tell us what happened and what you want done about it. There is no form to fill in and no reference number to quote. If a complaint is about an advert, the link to it is the most useful thing you can send.

You do not have to give a reason for unsubscribing or for asking us to delete your data. Those are rights, not requests, and we do not ask why.

[NEEDS HUMAN SIGN-OFF] Complaints contact route: Not set yet. A monitored address is registered before launch. Set up a monitored address, and decide the response times in section 3 rather than inheriting a number from a template.

3. What we do with it

1. We acknowledge it. So you know a person has it, not a queue.
2. We look at it and tell you what we found. Including when what we found is that we got it wrong.
3. We say what we have changed. If the answer is nothing, we say that and why, rather than letting it fade out.
4. We keep a record. Complaints that repeat are a fault in the site, not a run of unlucky users.

[NEEDS HUMAN SIGN-OFF] Set the acknowledgement and resolution times, and record them here as commitments. A published timescale that nobody meets is worse than no timescale, so set ones a small business can actually hit.

4. Complaints about an advert

An advert that is asking people for money, or that looks fraudulent, comes down while we look at it rather than after. We then check every other advert from the same advertiser, because one bad advert rarely arrives alone.

You do not need proof and you do not need to be right. A wrong report costs an advertiser a short delay. An unreported one costs the next person who applies.

5. Going above us

• Data protection. The Information Commissioner, at ico.org.uk. You can go straight there. It does not affect anything else you are doing with us.
• Unwanted emails. Also the Information Commissioner, which enforces the electronic marketing rules.
• Recruitment practices. The Employment Agency Standards Inspectorate takes complaints about how work is advertised and offered, including from people who dealt with a business that says it is not an agency.
• Exploitation or forced labour. The Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority, the Modern Slavery Helpline, or the police in an emergency.
• Accessibility. See the accessibility statement, which sets out the route if we do not put something right.

[NEEDS HUMAN SIGN-OFF] Check each contact route and its current address before publication rather than copying them from another site's page.

6. Complaints about an employer

If a complaint is about a job rather than an advert, about pay, hours, treatment at work or a recruitment decision, we are not the right place. We are not part of that relationship and we have no power over it. Tell us anyway if the advert was misleading, because that part is ours.

For the job itself, Acas gives free advice on employment rights, and the relevant regulator for care work is the inspectorate for the nation the employer operates in.