ROSEMARY Gamble has seen someone stabbed in her office, a woman threaten to injure herself and a bomb threat while working on the frontline for Swindon Council.

And she has to deal with people who complain almost daily to her staff on the customer services desk and will not listen to reason.

The job requires a thick skin, but some complainants just go too far. That is why the council has decided it is time to put a special procedure in place for dealing with vexatious complaints.

People who continually complain or abuse council staff could be banned from the Civic Offices and told they can only contact the council in writing.

Only senior officers will be able to take such action and they will have various other sanctions available to them.

For 48-year-old mother of two Mrs Gamble, the council's team leader for customer services, it is sad that it has come to the stage where such a procedure is necessary.

She said: "We get about 2,500 people per week though here and we may get one or two a month that are so difficult that we have to have them escorted from the building.

"The new procedure is there for those cases where we have exhausted all options and someone is being violent or continually complaining.

"It is there as a last resort. It's a shame we've even had to do this, but in today's increasingly violent society it has become necessary."

Mrs Gamble is in charge of 20 staff at Wat Tyler House, who are specially trained to deal with difficult customers.

They do not have screens in front of them, but Mrs Gamble fears that the time when they will be necessary is approaching.

She explained: "We choose not to have screens because we feel it enables us to serve the customers better. As society gets more violent, it's becoming more difficult not to give in to the need for screens.

"We had a woman who came in recently who went up to the desk and grabbed a pair of scissors and threatened to injure herself. You don't know whether that situation is going to turn on you.

"We had a man who claimed he had planted a bomb last year and we even had an incident where a member of the public was stabbed in front of the staff, which was very disturbing for everyone.

"You're never sure when something can turn nasty or violent. There's always that risk.

"We had a risk assessment recently on the screens and decided against them, but if there was a really serious incident and a member of staff was attacked, we would have to think again. In my opinion, we're moving ever closer down that road."

Mrs Gamble believes that the new procedure, while a useful back-up, will not be needed in most cases.

"We are very good at what we do and we can usually defuse most situations," she said.

"The staff here are very well trained and deal with it extremely well. We are very good at calming down someone who is irate and we will do everything we can to sort their problems out for them, sometimes over and above the call of duty. If it gets past that stage and the customer is being aggressive, we can call on a security guard who can remove the person from the building.

"You will always get people who, no matter what you do, will start shouting personal abuse at my staff and I won't tolerate that. I always tell my staff not to take it personally.

"It's not you they want to have a go at, it's the council and in a frontline service, you have to accept that not everybody is going to be happy. It's part and parcel of the job."