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Making
a complaint about the licensing activity of Information Fair Traders
All bodies authorised
to license Crown copyright information are required to meet the
standards of the Information Fair Trader Scheme. This includes having
an effective complaints procedure to handle complaints about their
licensing activity. If you are unhappy about a decision on Crown
copyright made by one of these bodies, or if you believe it has
breached its Information Fair Trader commitment, you should first
complain to the body itself to give it the chance to put things
right.
If you have exhausted the complaints procedure of the body, and
still believe that it has not met the standards of the Information
Fair Trader Scheme, you can ask HMSO to investigate the matter.
Please contact us at:
HMSO Regulation
Division
Room G.30
Admiralty Arch
North Side
The Mall
London
SW1A 2WH
e-mail: HMSO
Regulation
Phone: 020 7276 5217
Fax: 020 7276 5207
We will acknowledge your complaint within three working days. We
will confirm whether or not we agree to investigate your complaint,
request any further information we require and provide a provisional
timescale for completion of the investigation.
In investigating
complaints we will:
- establish
whether the complaint is about the body's performance of its Fair
Trader commitments;
If it
is, we will:
- invite the
Crown body to respond
- examine the
facts of the case,
- decide whether
there has been a breach of the commitment, and
- report our
findings to the Controller of HMSO.
If it
is not, we will:
- not investigate
the complaint, but may suggest other routes through which to progress
Outcome
of investigations
The Controller
of HMSO will make a decision as to whether to uphold the complaint.
She may suggest a solution to the dispute, request a review of the
body's IFT commitment, or agree to issue a licence directly to the
complainant. Though the Controller might recommend compensation
if our investigation showed that an applicant had made a quantifiable
loss because of a bad licensing decision, she does not have any
authority to impose financial penalties.
The Controller of HMSO will make sure that details of complaints
that we investigate are reported at the end of the year to Ministers
and that a report is published. The Advisory Panel on Crown Copyright
will draw lessons from investigations.
Complaints
about HMSO - putting things right
For most Crown
bodies outside the IFTS, HMSO is responsible for making decisions
on licensing the reuse of Crown copyright material. There is no
formal regulation oversight of our own licensing decisions, but
we are committed to a strong complaints process for maintaining
quality.
If you have a complaint about HMSO please let us know by using our
online complaints form.
For your information we have set out the standards we hope to achieve
when dealing with complaints, these can be found in our complaints
procedure.
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