Education and children's services now no. 1 source of complaints to LGO
Complaints in relation to education and children’s services now account for the largest share of those made to the Local Government Ombudsman, it has been revealed.
According to the LGO’s annual report for 2011/12, this category has taken over the number one spot from housing, which saw the number of complaints fall by 13%.
Complaints about planning and development remained the third largest category, although these also fell by almost 11%.
There was another sharp rise in adult social care complaints, up 24% over the year. This follows a 73% increase in 2010/11.
The LGO said its investigative teams decided 11,229 complaints during the course of the year, up 4%.
Reports were issued in relation to 77 complaints about councils (or less than 1% of cases). In a significant number of cases (21%), councils remedied the injustice during the course of the Ombudsman’s enquiries.
According to the annual report, the total number of complaints where redress was obtained or recommended for the complainant was 2,434 – or 25.3% of all complaints decided (excluding the complaints not in the LGO’s power to investigate).
This was lower than in 2010/11 (27.1%), although the report said it was difficult to make a direct comparision because of changes to the descriptions of its decisions.
A total of 3,347 remedies were recorded in the year, down from 3,797. The breakdown for these was:
- Apology: in 635 cases
- Take action and other: 1,107
- Review policies and/or procedures: 335
- Financial redress: 1,207.
Eight applications were made for permission for a judicial review of the LGO’s decision during 2011/12, of which seven were refused. The other case is awaiting a hearing in the Administrative Court.
Dr Jane Martin, Local Government Ombudsman and Chair of the Commission for Local Administration in England (the governing body for the LGO scheme), said 2011/12 had been a year of challenge and change. This included a significant cut to the organisation's budget.
She said the organisation intended to work together with other public sector ombudsman in England to ensure comprehensive access to citizens.
Dr Martin said: “The case studies highlighted in our annual report show that the Ombudsman can resolve complaints which affect the day-to-day experience of citizens – but many of the complaints should not have come to us in the first place and we are doing more to feed back lessons learned to councils and other bodies in jurisdiction to improve public administration and local public services.
“During the year, we progressed our plans to publish all our decision statements. This will help citizens make an informed choice of local public services and support improvement when things go wrong.”
The LGO has also published the annual review letters for each local authority in England, summarising the complaints received about them. These can be viewed here.
Philip Hoult