Updated: Monday 11:55am, January 6th 2025
Find guidance on submitting complaints about an interaction with a member of staff, grant applications, or funding decisions. Learn what issues can be addressed, how to escalate concerns, and our commitment to fairness, confidentiality, and inclusion.
If you would like to make a complaint about your contact with our staff, a grant application that you have made, or a grant that we have awarded, you should use the following guidance.
Please be assured that making a complaint will have no bearing on the level of service you receive from us. So, if your complaint is about a funding application, this will not affect your chances of getting a grant from us in the future. Our aim is to listen, resolve any issues, and learn to improve our services in future.
There are certain circumstances our complaints process will not handle; we will explain more in this policy.
If you have any communication needs and/or wish to submit your complaint in another format, please contact our office on 0207 566 1100 or e-mail awardapplications@unltd.org.uk.
You may be disappointed if we turn down your application for funding, however you cannot use the complaints procedure to appeal against a decision if we have followed our decision-making process correctly.
Please do not use this complaints procedure to make a complaint about any fraud you believe to have taken place. You should report this to the police, and/or our internal finance team on 0207 566 1100.
You cannot complain about our published policies through this process. If you have any comments about our policies, please send these to our general enquiries form on our website.
If you are not happy with the service you have received, please contact the person you have dealt with in the first instance, unless your complaint is about that individual. They may pass the complaint onto their line manager to investigate further, or it may be escalated to the Director and Stage Two where the complaint relates to discrimination and/or poor practice.
You should look to raise a complaint where you have one as soon as possible after the incident that has resulted in your complaint. If you no longer have the relevant contact details, or there is a reason you do not wish to engage with the person further, please contact our general enquiries form on our website or, if your complaint relates to our award making you can e-mail awardapplications@unltd.org.uk. If you cannot make a complaint in writing, please contact our office on 0207 566 1100 to arrange a call with our Head of Social Entrepreneur Support.
When making a complaint you should set out the facts as clearly as possible. Remember to include key details and dates where possible.
We will keep all complaints confidential. If you make a complaint, we will treat you with respect, and we expect you to treat our team in the same way.
If possible, we will try to put things right. We hope that we can settle complaints as quickly as possible.
Within five working days of receiving your complaint we will write or phone you to confirm receipt. We will also tell you how you can contact the person dealing with your complaint and when you can expect a reply.
You will receive a final response to your complaint within 1 0 working days. If we cannot give a full response during this time, we will tell you why, and when you can expect to receive it.
If you are not satisfied with the response, you can take this further by writing to our Director of Social Entrepreneur Support; Louise Cannon, louisecannon@unltd.org.uk.
Please tell us:
You must do this within four weeks of receiving a response to stage one. You will receive acknowledgement of your complaint within 5 working days, and a final decision within 15 working days; this enables time to investigate your complaint and our initial handling of it. Again, the Director will make you aware of any delays to the outcome pending further investigation, or because of any periods of absence.
If, having received a reply from the Director of Social Entrepreneur Support, you are still not satisfied you can write to the Chief Executive of UnLtd. You should not direct a complaint immediately to the Chief Executive without following the above process.
Our Chief Executive can be contacted via cos@unltd.org.uk.
The Chief Executive will acknowledge receipt of your complaint within five working days of receiving it. They will investigate your complaint and reach a decision on action to be taken, usually within ten working days. They will write to you and let you know their decision. The decision of the Chief Executive is final.
If at any stage your complaint is upheld, we will provide an explanation. We will also share details of action(s) we will put in place to ensure the same thing will not happen again and take action to put things right.
The Chief Executive reports all complaints to UnLtd’s Trustees on our Millennium Awards Trust Committee (MATAC). The Trustee members of MATAC will review all complaints and action taken. All Trustees will receive this information at their next Board meeting and a record of complaints is included in UnLtd’s Annual Report.
MATAC is responsible for the approval of a range of awards. There is no right of appeal against decisions taken by MATAC on individual applications.
If you use our complaints procedure, you are agreeing that we can use any personal information you send us for the purposes of dealing with your complaint. We may also give your personal information to other people and organisations if we must do so by law, or you have given us permission to do so.
We are committed to equity, diversity, and inclusion at UnLtd. We take complaints about discrimination seriously. We may use complaints about discrimination to review our policies, procedures, and training needs. This is to make sure we treat people with dignity and respect.
We will keep all information confidential unless we have your express permission to share further details and/or the issue you have highlighted becomes a Safeguarding concern.