The art of complaints handling

Tony Redmond recently stood down as Local Government Ombudsman after nine years in the role. He tells Philip Hoult about the progress that local authorities have made in handling complaints, and identifies where they often go wrong.

You spent almost a decade as the Local Government Ombudsman. What changes did you see in that time?

Councils are undoubtedly getting better at handling complaints. The principal changes during my time as Ombudsman have been around the much more substantial emphasis local authorities have placed on customer care and the initiatives they have undertaken to try and improve their relationship with their customers.

There has been a spin off from that, in that councils have inevitably looked at their complaints handling arrangements and they have definitely improved them. These arrangements are now more structured and this gives greater clarity to the complainant as to what the council does. There is much more form around the different stages of complaints handling, and they have improved their communication with complainants.

So yes, there have been some major plusses. We have seen a slow decline in the number of complaints we are receiving. It is slow – it has never dropped dramatically – but a case in point is that we were encountering up to 2,500 complaints on housing benefits alone at the height of the problems local authorities were facing back in the 1999-2001 period. That is now down to about 400.

Local authorities have addressed some major pressures and problems that they ran into when delivering certain services. The other side of the coin is around delay. If one was to pick on a particular issue that still causes a problem, it is delay and the vast majority of our complaints will have some element of time factor to them, where people are saying “this isn’t good enough, it’s taking too long”.

Are you concerned that, with all the financial pressures councils are under, complaints handling will be seen as a ‘back office’ function and therefore have its funding cut? Could you see councils going back to their old ways?

The first thing I would say is that the actual complaints handling function is a frontline service, however it is described. It is a service direct to the public and we have always argued that to be the case. Now, it would be foolish of me to assume that if there are to be very substantial cuts in budgets within local government, that the complaints handling function will be in some way exempt. It will no doubt be subject to exactly the same scrutiny and control as every other part of the local authority service.

The LGO is preparing for a potential increase in the number of complaints if there are substantial cuts in services or budgets, or as a result of cuts to the complaints handling function itself. But it would be impossible for me to gauge whether that will materialise in practice. All the Ombudsman can do is be ready for it.

How does the LGO prepare for that?

There are two things we need to do. The first is to be alive and prepared as an organisation to deal with any surge in complaints, should it come.

The second point is around what we do with the extra complaints when we get them. We are always looking at ways in which we can make sure the investigation is efficient and cost effective.

Alongside that is the question of proportionality. If the LGO is going to be subject to public sector spending constraints as well, then we are going to have to look to see what we can actually do with the capacity we have. And that may mean introducing proportionality, which means that we might have to look at the threshold for complaints of maladministration and injustice.

But we won’t anticipate that, we will wait to see what the problems are that we encounter and decide whether or not we have the capacity to continue to operate the service as we operate it now.

The LGO has been handed some new powers, for example around adult care. What impact will they have?

We have been given a separate allocation of resources for our work in relation to adult social care self funders. We have no idea whether that will prove to be sufficient, because we don’t know what level of demand we are actually going to face. It is a difficult one – we have done some calculations based on our experience in local authority adult social care, but until the service really gets underway, we know not.

We started in this area on 1 October 2010 and we are managing at the moment. But there has been an increase in the number of complaints generally on adult social care so the LGO will gradually build up its intelligence on what works in practice and whether or not we have adequate resources.

What we did in advance was we recruited a number of very experienced people across the whole spectrum, but with an emphasis on adult social care experience. We also recruited several specialists for the schools service that is being rolled out.

It has been trailed (and since confirmed by the Localism Bill) that LGO decisions will be made binding on authorities. Is this really necessary?

Well, we have a 99% compliance rate. So we are talking about a very small number of decisions a year. But I think the Secretary of State’s desire is to make sure that citizens can always be sure that whatever they complain about, if the Ombudsman finds in their favour, it will be done. That’s his line, which I can understand.

What percentage of complaints actually deliver a finding of maladministration? Is there an argument that the regime is overly burdensome?

The LGO investigates around just over 10,000 complaints [a year] and would typically find fault in about 2,500. They take the form of local settlements or reports, although you may have picked up the change in legislation whereby we now issue statements of reasons instead of local settlements. These are statements that are an abbreviated version of the whole investigation, showing the nature of the complaint, the jurisdiction, the investigation, the outcome, the remedy and so on. We are just in the throws of deciding how we publish statements because we do have the facility to publish them as well.

I think the way to look at it is this: the 10,000 figure breaks down into decisions on finding of fault, sometimes a finding of no fault, sometimes a finding of fault and no injustice and in those cases we would almost invariably tell the council there is still fault, even though there is no injustice suffered by the individual. And sometimes they are outside our jurisdiction. So, when you start to break it down, the 25% figure looks a bit different.

Why do you think some councils have better records than others? Are there any common themes where things go wrong?

It goes without saying that some local authorities are better than others when it comes to complaints. Our annual review demonstrates that some local authorities of a similar class and size show higher complaint numbers than others.

I would, however, argue slightly against that. Some councils believe that in terms of their test of accessibility and transparency, a high number of complaints demonstrates they are engaging with their public. In a way they want to know if things are going wrong and it is helpful to have that information available to them.

But of course if they all translate into failings and faults by the council, and that is proportionately higher than a local authority of a similar size and class, that is different, and we do have some cases like that, undoubtedly.

You see systemic and procedural weaknesses from time to time, which is often about the way in which the service is structured. You sometimes see decision making being flawed, which is one of those things that I’m afraid does happen particularly where the lack of information at the time the decision is made is a problem. You also sometimes pick up a local authority’s weakness in the frequency, quality and consistency of the service delivered. Last but not least, sometimes people just make mistakes. However good the organisation is, however strong the system’s procedures are, human error happens and things will go wrong sometimes.

So I think all of those factors come into play. Another one that sometimes is a warning sign that things might go wrong, is that there often teething troubles when new regulations are introduced. Any new piece of legislation which requires a radical change to the way in which a local authority operates, can generate problems as councils come to terms with the organisational, structural and service implications of delivering a new service.

Do you sometimes wish the sanctions available to the LGO were greater?

We are not a civil court, we don’t award damages. Instead we provide remedies which we believe in one sense try to put the complainant back in the place they should have been had the fault not occurred, and if that is not possible, then we look to some other means by which we seek redress and that often takes the form of compensation. Then we must try and make an assessment of how that compensation should be calculated. So I think we are generally content – having those two means by which we can deliver redress – that we are reasonable, balanced and proportionate in our decision making.

The LGO has been ahead of the transparency game when it comes to publishing complaints records (it started doing so seven years ago). Has that made a difference?

The first year we did not publish [the records] but we gave local authorities warning that we would publish the following year and at that time we were furnishing the Audit Commission with information in connection with what was then the Comprehensive Performance Assessment and then subsequently the Comprehensive Area Assessment. As we were providing that data anyway, we thought that putting it all on the website was important.

I think local authorities generally welcome publication because it is a form of diagnostic check of their own performance on complaints and to some degree on service delivery where we have commented on those as well. They often welcome Ombudsman input to any scrutiny committees that they may have which consider this information, so it has been well received overall.

There is often an increasing amount of law involved in the areas the LGO covers. Does the Ombudsman have the resources to deal with this?

On the staff we have a small number of lawyers who are investigators but they are not used as lawyers – it just happens to be the discipline they have when they join us.

We have a legal advisor and she is the person who provides us with our legal advice. She works, on a contract basis, most of her time with us and we only use external lawyers when we need to. She also has an assistant.

In a sense it all comes back to the Ombudsman’s judgement. The LGO is not judging on points of law, our business is not that, but obviously we have to operate within the law and it is around our jurisdiction and making sure we exercise our jurisdiction properly that we often look for advice.

Philip Hoult is Editor of Local Government Lawyer.

Tony Redmond was knighted in the New Year’s Honours list for services to local government.