The City Council is commited to providing high quality services to all it's customers and our aim is to give more service information, and to enable you to know what standards you can expect. Our range of customer contracts sets all this out and explains how to make a complaint if you are unhappy with the service you receive.

This information describes our service level guarantee in the Licensing Section.

About our service

The Food and Licensing team is responsible for a variety of services to ensure the safety of the public. The licensing section issues 1,400 licences a year and aims to enable businesses and organisers to achieve their objectives whilst ensuring the protection of Nottinghams' citizens.

Our service guarantees

We have focused our guarantee on the five types of licences most commonly applied for:

If your application is for:	We will notify you of the outcome:
A lottery registration	within 5 working days
A street collection permit	within 28 working days

We cannot offer guarantees about the following applications because we usually need to get information from other agencies such as the Police or Fire Brigade. Delays may also occur if you need to carry out works before the licence can be issued.

However, wherever we can, we can work to the following targets:

If your application is for:	We will notify you of the outcome:
A massage and special treatment licence	within 28 working days

The above guarantees can only apply if the application is properly made and full supporting documents enclosed where necessary - if your application is incomplete we will contact you within seven days telling you why.

Do you need a licence?

We also deal with the following types of licences and we will give you a realistic deadline for each of these if you contact us to discuss the details of your application.

Amusements with prizes, animal boarding, dog breeding, house to house collections, performing animals, pet shops, rag flock, riding premises, scrap metal dealers, sex establishments, skin piercing, and motor salvage operators.

Listening to you

We want to provide services which meet your needs. To do this, we are constantly carrying out customer surveys to find out what you think of our service and what changes you might like us to make. If you are asked to complete a survey, please take the opportunity to let us know your views. We also commit to:

Opening promptly at the times we advertise

• Offering an efficient and courteous service to our customers at all times
• Providing clear information and advice about our policies and procedures
• Listening to the views of our customers and, where practicable, acting on them
• Seeking continuous improvement in the standard of service that we offer

If you are not satisfied

We hope that you will be happy with the service we provide. However, if you want to make a complaint about our service you can do this by telephone, letter or by calling at our office. If you make a complaint we will reply to your complaint within 14 days.

Note: The customer contract may be reviewed from time to time.

The Licensing Customer Contract can be downloaded as a pdf document 222KB

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