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| News from the Ombudsman - July 2023 |
Welcome... Welcome to the latest edition of News from the Ombudsman. In this edition you can read about how we: - have issued our annual review of local government complaints.
- are working with the Equality and Human Rights Commission.
- have seen encouraging progress from one council after we examined its complaints process.
- can help if your council has not dealt with your complaint in good time.
We hope you enjoy reading our newsletter. If you'd like to hear more about the work we do, why not follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn? | |
See how your council is performing  We've now been publishing consistent complaints data for nearly a decade. And we still keep giving insights to help scrutinise how local council services are performing. Our tenth Annual Review of Local Government Complaints this year highlights our ever-increasing focus on Special Educational Needs and Disabilities support for children and young people. In 2014, SEND complaints made up just 17% of our total caseload but now swallows up almost a quarter (24%). The average uphold rate in this area tips 84%. The data also reveals some interesting stories regionally. The area making the largest proportion of its complaints about children and education is the South East, at 33%. This contrasts with nearby London in which the subject makes up just 12% of peoples' complaints. In the London area, housing and homelessness make up the biggest area of concern (26%), compared with just 15% of complaints nationwide. In the North, people are more concerned about Adult Care Services, making up nearly a fifth (19%) of complaints, compared with a national average of 13%. Our annual review sums up the national trends. But sitting behind that are the performance figures of every local authority in England. Don't forget to check out Your Councils' Performance Map, if you want to see how your council has been faring – we now have five continuous years of data posted. | Working with the national equality body  In recent years, we have increasingly looked at complaints from the perspective of peoples' human rights. We now regularly make decisions about whether an organisation has had due regard to someone's human rights in how it treated them. We have worked closely with the Equality and Human Rights Commission – the body with the power to challenge discrimination and promote fairness in Britain – for some time. Now our two organisations have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU). This puts our working relationship on a formal footing, sets out how we will work together, and provides the foundation for sharing information in a structured way. Through this, we hope to benefit the public by discussing issues of mutual concern that exposes and shares where peoples' human rights aren't properly considered. | Encouraging progress from Liverpool  As part of issuing our annual review letters to councils last week, we published our report which reviewed Liverpool City Council's complaint procedures. The council invited us to work with them to look at its processes, as part of a raft of reviews prompted by government-appointed commissioners brought in to oversee the council's performance. Twelve months on from issuing the report, we are encouraged by the council's progress. Our review included various recommendations on how the council could improve its complaint handling. The council has developed a plan to respond to those recommendations. Actions progressed so far include work to bring three separate complaints teams together, training its staff and embedding complaints data into regular management reporting. In the council's latest complaint statistics published last week, our data appears to back up the council's renewed approach. In a quarter of cases we upheld, we agreed with the remedy the council had offered to put things right when first responding to the complaint. This compares with an average of 10% for similar councils. We now look forward to seeing the council maintain its momentum on improving how it handles complaints. | Complaints handling  In recent months we have issued public interest reports highlighting delays in complaint handling in three separate authorities. Most recently we found significant delays by Kent County Council when responding to complaints about special educational needs services. And in April we issued reports against three councils where local people were left waiting too long for a response to their complaint. We expect councils, care providers and other organisations we investigate, to comply with their own policies and procedures when responding to complaints. When a complaint is complex and an organisation needs more time to gather evidence it should keep the person who has complained informed of its progress. If you have complained to the organisation but have not had a response within a reasonable time, you can also complain to us. We can then ask the organisation about your complaint before deciding what to do. We think up to 12 weeks is usually a reasonable time. But this may be longer for complaints about children's and adult's care services, which follow a statutory process. We have issued guidance to organisations we investigate about how to respond to complaints effectively as well as offering training in effective complaint handling. We plan to issue further guidance in 2024 providing more clarity on our expectations. | |
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