Successful engagement with senior leaders requires credibility

At the end last year I attended our complaint manager conferences. This gave me an opportunity to hear directly   from officers at the front line of complaint handling in local authorities. Their passion for treating the public fairly and providing good outcomes for complaints was clear, but I regularly heard of their difficulties in raising the profile of complaints within their organisations. 

A strong organisational culture that is open to challenge can only come from strong leadership at the very top level. This requires effective scrutiny and oversight of complaints systems so they are seen as a core part of performance and risk management. It is important that Ombudsman organisations engage directly with people at the most senior level to make sure this happens.

When I took up the role of Ombudsman I visited a number of local authorities and spoke to senior leaders about our work. It was clear many already view complaints as an important learning tool and use performance data as a regular part of quality and risk reporting. However, this is not the case across the country and so we are increasingly focussing on standards of leadership and governance in our casework.

We have always issued guidance to organisations we investigate, but we have recently issued our first good practice guides aimed directly at senior leaders and elected councillors with responsibility for scrutinising performance. We believe that by speaking directly to these audiences we will have a greater impact. 

But, important though guidance is, we need to do more. We must show we are a credible voice that should be listened to and that our guidance can make a positive difference locally. Working with a group of pilot councils and listening to the lived experiences of people handling complaints every day we have been able to produce guidance that is practical and grounded in the realities of managing modern local authorities.

We also recognise our own place within the sector we operate within. Our guidance does not exist in isolation and so we have worked with representative bodies to make sure our guidance references and complements best value standards and wider good practice in leadership and governance. By doing this we can show we understand the pressures and expectations on the sector outside complaints.

We are exploring ways we can help spot early warning signs of failings in leadership and governance in our decisions. We have found fault with local authorities in the past where they have failed to deliver our recommendations which they have agreed to. These cases potentially demonstrate a lack of leadership and scrutiny denying members of the public the redress which the authority has said it will provide. We believe the most effective way of achieving wider organisational change is by engaging those at senior level in addressing the failings we see in local services. 

We plan on building on this work by reviewing the way we make recommendations for improvements to the way services are designed and delivered. We will be encouraging leaders to take an active role in helping us shape these recommendations, recognising they are best placed to understand how to deliver improvements locally. We will also be doing more to encourage councils to make best use of scrutiny arrangements to ensure our recommendations have a lasting effect.

Alongside this we are working with several university research projects exploring the long-term impact of our work on improving public services. The research is looking at what happens after we finish our work and complete compliance checks. We want to use this research, focusing on special educational needs and adult social care decisions, to understand how best to tailor our recommendations so they can have a meaningful impact on citizens. 

We recognise it is difficult for local authorities to analyse performance in relation to complaint handling due to a lack of national standards for reporting data. These standards exist in other parts of the sector meaning senior leaders and councillors can quickly understand how they are performing compared to others. To resolve this, we are calling for changes to our legislation through our Triennial Review to give us powers to monitor compliance with our Complaint Handling Code. This will allow us to set national standards for reporting data on complaint handling performance, allowing local authorities to benchmark their performance against similar organisations.

Good complaint handling and effective redress for the public can only exist where there is effective scrutiny and oversight from senior leaders within local authorities. It is our role to share learning from our casework to support authorities to be accountable for their actions. Where authorities fail to do so, we will use our casework to shine a light on leadership and governance issues, and make effective recommendations to deliver meaningful change.