Make greater use of complaints insight to improve service, says LGO report

Councils should make greater use of insight gained from complaints to support wider learning and drive service improvement, a report from the Local Government Ombudsman and the Centre for Public Scrutiny (CfPS) has argued.

The publication, Aiming for the best: Using lessons from complaints to improve public services, focuses on the role of overview and scrutiny committees.

“Effective complaint handling goes further than having proper procedures – it also means promoting an organisational culture that is open to challenge, makes the most of opportunities to learn and is willing to change,” the LGO and the CfPS said.

The guide sets out:

• a framework that overview and scrutiny committees can use to review insight through complaints that considers cultural, operational and strategic factors. Factors that should be considered include: promoting a positive culture about the value of complaints; exploring the information held about complaints and how it is used; and making use of the business planning or commissioning cycle
• Potential enablers to the effective use of complaints insight. These are: creating a culture of learning and improvement; providing people with lots of ways to give feedback; leadership in sharing lessons across the organisation; and a coordinated resource that maximises the impact of learning
• Common barriers to the effective use of complaints insight. These include: treating complaints as an opportunity to simply defend practice; poor communication with citizens and complainants; a silo approach to complaints, no sharing of lessons across the organisation; and little connection between feedback and strategic planning.

The guide also includes examples of good practice from a range of councils. These include introducing a new complaints unit that takes into account the wider implications of complaints for the service concerned and not simply focusing on resolving individual issues. Another council publishes a ‘complaints mandate’ with six customer priorities “to recognise that complaints are an opportunity to demonstrate commitment to customer values and to learn and improve service provision”.

Dr Jane Martin, Ombudsman and Acting Chair of the Commission for Local Administration, said: “Complaints provide a valuable source of information for reviewing services and helping to shape them based on the experiences of users.

“They should be viewed as a strategic resource providing rich and diverse perspectives. They can illustrate how well goals and standards are being achieved from the user’s perspective and any unintended consequences of the way policies are implemented or decisions made.”

Jessica Crowe, Executive Director of CfPS, said: “CfPS has identified that complaints and redress for wrongs are part of the web of accountability – they can provide a useful reality check to traditional performance management processes.

“Overview and scrutiny committees often gather insight from service users through their reviews but they can also challenge the organisational culture to learn from complaints to improve services…. In light of the difficult decisions being taken about the future funding of services, we hope that OSCs will use this latest guide to influence the extent to which these decisions reflect what is important to service users.”

Philip Hoult