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News from the Ombudsman - May 2024 |
Welcome... Welcome to the latest edition of News from the Ombudsman. In this edition you can read about how we're helping: - You to access longer pages on our website.
- Councils to improve their complaints handling.
- Councillors to scrutinise their own organisations.
- Organisations to signpost you to our services more accurately.
We hope you enjoy reading our newsletter. If you'd like to hear more about the work we do, why not follow us on X or LinkedIn? | |
We've made our webpages easier to read  We are committed to being transparent. Part of how we do this, is to make freely available on our website lots of information about how we work. We publish not only our complaint decisions and data about councils, but much of the guidance our staff follow when investigating. It means anyone can easily see how we come to our decisions. These web pages are often long, containing lots of detailed information. So we have improved how the pages are broken down into easy-to-follow chapters. We have also added a new 'search this document' function, so people can look for key phrases within a long document, similar to how gov.uk works. | Effective Complaint Handling Guidance  We have withdrawn our guidance on Effective Complaint Handling for local authorities. The guidance was issued in 2020 and no longer reflects our current approach to complaints about adult social care and children's services. The publication of the Complaint Handling Code earlier this year has also affected parts of the guidance which now need to be updated. We intend to issue an updated version of the guidance in early 2025. Councils can still get support from our Manual for Councils and by contacting us directly for advice. | Supporting oversight of councils through scrutiny  Council services often have a direct impact on people's lives and elected councillors play a vital role in making sure decisions are well taken and that public money is spent effectively. We believe that the information we share about complaints and the reports we produce should be used by local authority Overview and Scrutiny Committees when they are examining how their council operates. Earlier this year the Government ran a consultation aimed at updating guidance for councils on overview and scrutiny and we sent a full response. In late April the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities published its updated statutory guidance which will be of interest to people who want to check that their council is operating its scrutiny function effectively. The guidance requires councils to consider relevant information sources, specifically mentioning the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman's recommendations and reports as a valuable source of information. This increased focused on our work will help ensure decision makers have the information they need to hand when taking decisions on public services. | Our contact details  We are asking organisations such as charities and advice agencies, to check that information on their websites and other literature is up to date. We have discovered that a number of organisations, including some local councils, have out of date information on their websites. This includes e-mail addresses that have not been in use for over 10 years and details of how to complain by fax which has not been an option for an even longer period. You can find information about how to contact us on our website. We have produced some standard text that organisations we investigate can use to signpost to us. This can be found in our Manual for Councils. | Our work and the general election  The approaching general election means that, like all publicly funded organisations, we will now take extra caution in carrying out activities that could interfere with the outcome of the election. Many of the higher profile reports we publish highlight failures in national policy or practice through the stories of individuals who have complained to us. Until after the election, we will not publish any focus reports highlighting national issues with public services, or reports about individual councils that we would normally promote to the media in the public's interest. However, our core casework, by no means, will come to a standstill. We will continue as normal to carry out investigations and publish the hundreds of decisions we make each week. These will still be delivered to the inboxes of subscribers every Thursday lunchtime. | News you may have missed... |
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