Public authorities are subject to the fluency duty in relation to all of their staff who work in customer-facing roles and must have a procedure in place to deal with complaints about insufficient proficiency in spoken English.
To make a complaint under the Fluency Duty Code of Conduct, you should use our normal complaints procedure.
For the purposes of the fluency duty, a legitimate complaint is one about the standard of spoken English of a public sector member of staff in a customer-facing role. It will be made by a member of the public or someone acting on his or her behalf, complaining that the authority has not met the fluency duty.
A complaint about a member of staff's accent, dialect, manner or tone of communication, origin or nationality would not be considered a legitimate complaint about the fluency duty.
