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Find out about changes to our services and Christmas opening times on our Festive information page. To find out when your bin will be collected over the festive period, visit Changes to County Durham bin collections at Christmas.

Due to maintenance, the following systems will be unavailable from 11.45am on Tuesday 24 December until 8.00am on Thursday 2 January: our online Council Tax, business rates and housing benefit services, and our welfare assistance form. We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause.

Social media


We use social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, to communicate with our residents and visitors.

Like or follow us for the latest news and information about our services.

During major events or bad weather, our main Twitter and Facebook feeds are the best way to get important and timely information.

Follow the council

Monitoring of social media accounts

The accounts are monitored during office hours Monday to Friday. Due to the volume of requests we may be unable to give you a personal response. However, if a number of people are raising similar questions we may issue one response which aims to help everyone. We may also point you in the direction of the people at the council who are best placed to respond to your query.

The best way to report a problem with a council service is to use our online customer services system - Do it online.

Social media moderation

We welcome debate and opinion about the services we offer (even if they criticise us). However, we reserve the right to delete posts that feature any of the following:

  • Offensive material such as swearing, sexism, racism or homophobia
  • Posts that libel or defame someone
  • Messages that name or identify specific council employees
  • Posts that contain incorrect information that could mislead others
  • Posts containing personal information that it would be unwise to share in public
  • Posts or comments which seek to publicise campaigns by individuals, groups or organisations
  • Spam, advertising or phishing/scam messages
  • Copyrighted material from other sites without permission
  • Messages of a political nature
  • Anything else we consider upsetting/misleading or sensitive

If someone repeatedly posts such material on any of our social media outlets we may block them from posting anything further to protect other users. We may also reserve the right to report those posting inappropriate material to the relevant authorities. 

If you wish to complain about material on our social media feeds which features any of the above, please contact us.

For advice on sharing photos safely on Instagram, visit the Instagram: help centre.

Asking us to follow or like you or share one of your messages

We follow and like a small number of people, mostly our partners in the emergency services, other organisations we work with and local media. This allows us to monitor important information that we may need to make residents aware of. To enable us to do this we cannot follow or like a large number of other people as we would risk missing key messages. Therefore please don't be offended if we don't follow or like you back.

Please note: following or liking someone does not necessarily mean that we support or endorse them or their views.

We will only very rarely retweet and this will most likely be important information from our partners that we think residents and visitors need to be aware of. We may also occasionally support national campaigns or retweet information from partners relating to larger events that we are playing a part in.

Please don't be offended if we don't retweet something that you have asked us to. As a local authority we are required to be very careful about what we retweet as people can see this as an endorsement of the person/organisation/event.

Use and monitoring of social media during pre-election periods (purdah)

If the period leading up to and including an election the law requires us to not promote any particular political party. During this time we will continue to post messages on our social media however we will not mention any specific elected members who may be involved. We will continue to remove responses to any of our posts that feature an opinion on a particular political party/representative. 



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