Policy paper

PackUK: acceptable behaviour policy

Updated 20 January 2025

We value the importance of effective and empathetic communication to help people use our service and enable us to carry out our work efficiently.

We expect people who engage with us to behave in an acceptable way.

We expect PackUK personnel to:

• provide a fair, open, proportionate and accessible service

• listen and understand

• treat everyone who contacts us with respect, empathy and dignity

We expect everyone who contacts PackUK to:

• treat our personnel with respect and courtesy

• engage with us in a way that does not impact on our ability to carry out our work effectively and efficiently for the benefit of everyone who interacts with us

We hope that most people will be satisfied with the contact they have with us, but we recognise that some people may not be. You can provide feedback about our service at any time during your contact with us.

Behaviour that is unacceptable

We recognise that some people who contact us may have reason to feel aggrieved, upset or distressed. However, it is not acceptable when that anger is directed towards our personnel. In a small number of cases, a person’s behaviour while engaging with us may become unacceptable because it involves abuse of our employees or our service.

When this happens, we will take action to protect our personnel and maintain our ability to do our work and provide a service to others.

Examples of what we consider to be unacceptable behaviour include:

• aggressive, abusive or offensive behaviour

• physical behaviour, language, images (whether face-to-face, via telephone or written in emails, letters or online) that may cause employees to feel intimidated, uncomfortable, degraded, threatened or abused is not acceptable

This includes abuse about any protected characteristic, as defined by the Equality Act 2010 (age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex and sexual orientation).

Unacceptable demands

We may consider demands about the nature or scale of our service to be unacceptable.

For example:

• requesting responses in unreasonable timescales

• insisting on speaking with senior colleagues or escalating to senior colleagues when not getting the desired answer

• vexatious requests for information

• repeatedly changing the substance of a complaint

• raising unrelated concerns or refusing to accept a decision where explanations for the decision have been given