Unacceptable customer behaviour policy
Source: gov.uk (2025-02-24)

Information about how we manage unacceptable customer behaviour consistently and fairly.

The Valuation Office Agency (VOA) is committed to dealing with all customers fairly and impartially, and to providing a high standard of service. Our customer charter sets out how we will work with customers to deliver a professional and expert customer service experience.

Whilst most customers are satisfied with our services, this isn’t always the case. In times of trouble or distress, customers may act out of character – in a small number of cases, customers may behave in an unacceptable manner.

The VOA has a duty to ensure the safety and welfare of our staff, and our staff should be able to work without the fear or threat of abuse, harassment, discrimination, or violence. We support colleagues in raising these concerns already through our Speaking Up Safely policies. We are now adding to this with support for colleagues experiencing unacceptable behaviour from customers.

This policy sets out the VOA’s approach to unacceptable customer behaviour, including the actions to take when faced with this and how this behaviour should be reported. It ensures the VOA can manage unacceptable customer behaviour in a fair and consistent manner.

This policy applies to everyone who accesses our services or engages with our staff.

For those covered by the VOA agent standards, unacceptable behaviour may be considered as a breach under the agent standards, this policy or both.

What is unacceptable behaviour?

Unacceptable behaviour means acting in a way that is unreasonable, regardless of the level of someone’s stress, frustration, or anger. It may involve acts, words or physical gestures that could cause another person distress or discomfort.

There are other behaviours that may be considered abusive, aggressive, or unreasonable, in line with this policy.

Aggressive or abusive behaviour

This is behaviour or language that could cause someone to feel afraid, threatened, bullied, or abused. It may include:

physical violence or threats of physical violence

bullying or intimidating behaviour

derogatory remarks relating to somebody’s race, sex, gender, age or sexuality

comments relating to disability, perceived gender, religion, belief, or any other personal characteristic

offensive gestures

shouting

Hate incidents and crimes

A hate crime is abuse based on race, religion, sexual orientation, disability, or transgender identity. It can include threatening behaviour, assault, damage to property, inciting others to commit hate crimes, harassment, and online abuse.

The Crown Prosecution Service provides further information on hate crime (https://www.cps.gov.uk/crime-info/hate-crime).

The VOA encourages reporting of hate crime to the police and will support our staff through the process.

Inappropriate behaviour

Inappropriate behaviour causes an individual to feel uncomfortable or belittled. Much of this will depend on what an individual is comfortable with, but can include:

insulting or degrading language

including inappropriate banter

innuendo

malicious allegations

Sexual harassment

Further to this, the VOA operates a zero-tolerance approach to sexual harassment, which is defined as “unwanted conduct of a sexual nature, which is intended to, or has the effect of, violating a person’s dignity or creating an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment for them”. Sexual harassment is unlawful under the Equality Act 2010 (https://www.gov.uk/guidance/equality-act-2010-guidance).

Unreasonable demands or vexatious contact

Customers may make requests, or place demands on our services that we cannot reasonably accommodate. Depending on the nature of these they might be classed as unreasonable demands or vexatious contact.

The parameters for this will depend on the circumstances and each case should be considered on its own merit. A customer who is being persistent isn’t necessarily displaying unacceptable customer behaviour.

However, the behaviour of customer who persistently contacts us about the same issue can amount to unreasonable demand. Such behaviour takes up a disproportionate amount of our time and resources and can affect our ability to provide a service to others.

Unreasonable demands or vexatious contact can include, but isn’t limited to:

the volume of correspondence they generate or send, including sending the same or similar requests repeatedly

seeking an outcome that cannot be achieved, including persistent rejection of decisions made or explanations provided by VOA staff relating to the services we provide

repeated and frequent contact without giving enough time to respond to previous correspondence

not following our complaints procedure

insisting on speaking to someone who is not available or is not the appropriate person (such as the Chief Executive)

demanding responses to correspondence that is deemed to be unacceptable

adopting a ‘scatter gun’ approach: pursuing parallel complaints about the same issue with different members of staff

How we manage unacceptable customer behaviour

The VOA will not tolerate unacceptable customer behaviour. Where unacceptable customer behaviour is identified, depending on the circumstances, the VOA can take a range of actions including:

ending calls

not replying to abusive e-mails or letters (correspondence will still be reviewed to ensure no new issues have been raised by the customer)

restricting access to the VOA

referring hate crimes or incidents to the police

referring matters to the police where other criminal offences have been threatened or committed

Before any action is taken, customers should always be warned that they are behaving in an unacceptable way so that they can change their behaviour.

Restricting access to the VOA

If a customer continues to behave in an unacceptable manner, the VOA can temporarily or permanently place communication restrictions on the customer. These restrictions may include:

limiting our contact to written correspondence

limiting phone calls to specific days and/or times

limiting our contact to a specific VOA staff member

limiting contact to a specific e-mail address or telephone number

not providing further responses to a customer’s contact if the issues have been previously considered

Other limitations may be considered appropriate depending on the circumstances.