I wish that there was an easy answer to that question. The first thing to think about is the person who is making the complaint. They are at the heart of what we do—people should be at the heart of public services. We understand why they are making the complaint and why it is important. We understand the scale of the impact that the incident may have had, even if we cannot always understand the experience because we have not been through it, as we can see how it is affecting them or their family. It is, therefore, very difficult for us to say to them—even though we understand all of that—“This will be the limit of what we can look at for you,” because we are basically nice guys and we want to put everything right.
We have to manage expectation from the outset, and we try to be realistic from the outset. Once we have understood the outcome that somebody is looking for and we have told them that we will look at achieving one thing but that we cannot do something else, it is then dependent on the approach that we take and the relationship that the complainer has with the public body. There will then come a point at which we make a decision, and it may not be exactly what the complainer wants. I can see that, when we say that that is as far as we can go, it might look as though we are hiding behind what our legislation says.
I hope that learning and improvement can add to that by picking up some of the issues that are not necessarily part of the complaint. For example, what was the communication like? That issue may not have been within the complaint. Could we reassure people by looking at a different issue, which might help?
There is also something about the way in which we interact with complainers. When we have an incredibly large workload, it is very difficult to give every person every minute that we want to give them on the phone or by meeting them. We try to talk to people on the phone or meet them, but there are occasions when the sheer volume of what my officers have to work on means that they will send a factual email. There is nothing wrong in that, but I can see how, had I received it, feeling as emotional as a complainer would, I might wonder whether they really cared. Well, yes, we do really care.
We are going through a period of reflection about how we communicate. Since I took up office, I have decided that, when we have particularly challenging complainers or public bodies, far more personal contact is needed, and I give out my personal email address—I am happy to do that. Ultimately, it is about not just improving relationships but people recognising that there comes a point at which, however good we may be and however far we have gone, we can go no further. It is sometimes hard for people to accept that, and those are the cases in which the relationship breaks down most. We and the public sector are still working on that.