Lake Macquarie City Council in top 10 for complaints to the NSW Ombudsman

The Hunter was also home to the second most complained about local health district.

Lake Macquarie City Council racked up 54 actionable complaints to the Ombudsman in 2020-21, a long way behind the Central Coast Council with 158 complaints but still in the top ten.

With a rate of 26 complaints per 100,000 residents, Lake Macquarie came in at number six. That was an improvement on the council's performance the previous year when it was the subject of 64 complaints, with a rate of 31 per 100,000 residents.

The NSW Ombudsman's Annual Report released on Tuesday said the top ten most complained about councils made up 29 per cent of all local government actionable complaints finalised in 2020-21.

The most commonly complained about aspects of councils included customer service, complaint-handling processes, council enforcement action, charges and fees, and "the merits or reasoning of council decisions when they are exercising their discretion", the report said.

"In 2020-21, we received more local government complaints than we did in the previous year about customer service and complaint handling," the report said.

In response, the NSW Ombudsman's office has reached out to all councils to engage with them about their complaint handling improvement program.

Meanwhile, the number of complaints escalated to the Ombudsman about the Hunter New England local health district has more than doubled.

It accounted for nearly one fifth of all actionable complaints made to the watchdog about local health districts in 2021-22, second only to the Sydney local health district.

While it has occupied second place before, including in 2021-20, the number of complaints has increased from 21 that financial year to 47 in 2021-22.

That is more complaints reported to the Ombudsman than was made about the NSW Ambulance Service (12 actionable complaints), the Environment Protection Agency (20), Liquor and Gaming NSW (8), and the NSW Electoral Commission (9).

In the community services sector, the Ombudsman received the most complaints about statutory child protection, where people who have made a report about a child at risk of harm say that "it appears that no action has been taken", the report says.

Another area of dissatisfaction was foster care, specifically a lack of support for foster carers, as well as parents concerned about the amount of contact they can have with their children.

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