Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee

Meeting date: Tuesday, December 5, 2023

Official Report 715KB pdf

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Scottish Public Services Ombudsman: “Annual Report 2022-23”

Agenda item 2 is to take evidence on the Scottish Public Services Ombudsman’s annual report 2022-23. Rosemary Agnew is our ombudsman; Andrew Sheridan is the SPSO’s head of improvement, standards and engagement; and Niki Maclean is the SPSO’s director.

I invite Rosemary Agnew to make a short opening statement.

Good morning, and thank you. I also thank you for rearranging the timing of the meeting to before Christmas rather than after it. I can still just about remember last year at this point.

I do not propose to go through everything that members have already seen in updates in the annual report. Our main themes are around our broad statutory functions.

Obviously, public service complaints have their challenges, but one of the biggest challenges for us currently is volumes. We have seen dramatic increases, even in the past two months, in demand and complaints.

The Scottish welfare fund has a very distinct type of function. The numbers of complaints coming in about that are relatively stable. The challenges there are more about policy, guidance and the unpredictability of the future.

We have seen the Independent National Whistleblowing Officer function bedding down a lot more in the first year and going into the second. We are learning a lot more about the approach to investigation, which is quite different from that to public service complaints.

The final area of our work is about engagement, communication and complaint standards. In that area, we have been working on child-friendly complaints, and we have done a lot of development work on our function in terms of training and developing a new approach to outreach since the lockdown finished.

There are four very distinct areas, but the common themes are resourcing, capacity and trying to foresee numbers while at the same time building efficiencies, because we recognise that resourcing will be an issue for everyone.

Members will also have had an update from our six-month point. We found that really helpful to do because it gives a sense of progression. We even have an update on some of those figures. I know that members have had a particular interest in the backlog of unallocated complaints that we started last year with.

At that point, I will leave things open for questions. I hope that we will cover all four areas.

Thank you very much for that introduction.

If we do not ask the right questions for the things that you want to get on the record, please make sure that you get them on the record anyway.

In your opening statement, you mentioned the volumes of complaints received. I am interested to learn a bit more about that. You have written to us about the unprecedented increase in public service complaint numbers so far in 2023. Do you have a sense of why that is? What trends are you observing?

By the time we started the current year, we were seeing numbers creeping up and, by the time we did the six-month update, we were fairly close to where we were pre-Covid. However, in the past two months, the number of public service complaints received has increased by 40 per cent.

It is easy to say that Covid was the factor in all of that. In 2022-23, we probably saw the legacy of Covid in that it disrupted our service and our ability to get information from public bodies, because their services were disrupted. However, I do not think that that was necessarily the underlying issue; I think that it was an exacerbating one.

Services were already under pressure prior to Covid. There were already complaints about waiting times for elective surgery and concerns about the scope, value and quality of public services. Covid exacerbated some of those existing issues.

The two things that have been significantly different have been the double whammy of the cost of living and inflation, and public expectation. Certainly, the cost of living and inflation taken together did not just increase day-to-day living costs for people; they increased the costs to public bodies in delivering their services. Then, with inflation not reducing as quickly as everybody expected, even when the cost of living started to go down slightly—it is unlikely that it will go back to where it was—the spending power of what is left is reducing. When we combine all of that with coming out of Covid and the impact that it had on public services, we see that people are partly worried and partly frustrated.

We see that in pockets of things. We do not so much get people saying, “I can’t see my general practitioner,” which maybe we were getting more of during Covid. I do not know how to describe it. It is not about losing patience; it is about the frustration of not being able to get the service. That manifests itself in complaints. My colleagues who have worked with complaints know that, when money gets tight, complaints tend to go up. It is about all those things, not just one of them, and I do not see the demand on our service getting noticeably better for the next short while.

I do not know whether anybody wants to add anything to that.

I agree with that. At times, there will be large volumes of complaints about a specific issue. In those circumstances, we would take one lead complaint. However, that is not what we are seeing at the moment; there is a general rise in complaints across the board. Obviously, if there were large volumes of complaints about a specific issue, we would manage it in that way, but that is not what we are seeing, and we are not able to batch cases in that way.

Through the networks, my team is picking up that public bodies are definitely feeling more stretched, and they are seeing more complaints coming in. We try to support them through engagement activities, sharing practice, and giving a focus on resolution-based approaches to complaints. However, the volume of complaints is still increasing, and we get the feeling from public bodies that they are feeling stressed and stretched. It is just a perfect storm at the minute.

That is a good point.

Rosemary Agnew mentioned that Covid disrupted the ability to get information from the public sector. Your website says that there is still a four-month delay. Aside from the inability to get information, did Covid create a delay in anything else?

We were like every other public body. Covid affected our capacity, because our colleagues had home schooling to do. Do you remember home schooling? We caught Covid as well. For the first three months of the first lockdown, there was the adjustment to working in a different way.

Members can see that we had a much more stable environment in the reporting year that we are discussing. We have been much more geared up to working at home or in a hybrid way, but that still took time, given the disruption to our staff and our ability to work.

Thank you very much for that.

Good morning to you all. It is nice to see you.

I want to ask Rosemary Agnew about the number of complaints that went through the investigation stage prior to her being in post. I think that there were 800 or so. After you came in, that seemed to drop to 192. I invite you to reflect on why that was and what happened there. Why are so few cases being investigated?

At the outset, it is probably worth saying what the word “investigation” means, because it has a specific meaning in the Scottish Public Services Ombudsman Act 2002. That is a formal step in which notice is served on the public body and a more formal investigation is done.

In the everyday sense of the word “investigate”, we do not investigate fewer cases. Over the past couple of years in particular, we have been doing a constant review of our own service. As a result of model complaints handling and engagement work, we are seeing much better investigation at the local level than we have seen over the years for all sorts of reasons, and we have adjusted to that.

Yesterday, I was reading the Crerar report. One of the things that it said was that more complaints handling should be done at the local level. That is what we have achieved, and we are seeing the benefit of that.

There are some complaints that will not go anywhere because they are out of jurisdiction. However, once we have established whether we can investigate something, we look to see whether we should investigate it. It is not that we do not do any work on the complaints—we do quite a bit of work on some of them—but, at that stage, we explore what has gone on before us. We will often get the complaint file from the public body, and we will certainly follow up to see whether it has done what it said that it would do. If we see evidence of a good investigation and we can achieve no more for the complainer than has already been achieved, because learning has taken place or a remedy has been put in place, it does not seem fair to put a complainer or a public body through a more in-depth investigation that will pretty much repeat what has already been done and get to the same place.

There is a fail-safe in that, which is that we also consider the public interest. If there is something that requires us to go through the 192 cases that Willie Coffey mentioned because there needs to be a public report, that is what we will do.

The approach enables us to be much more proportionate in how we use our resources for benefit across the board. The important things are that learning must be captured and the remedies that are promised must be put in place. If we come across something where that has not happened, we will progress that.

If I were a complainer, I would be saying, “Are you just doing what the public body says that it has done, or are you just not looking at that?” We call it an inquiry, but it is often a mini-investigation, essentially. Such decisions are made under my delegated authority, so I do not see those cases day to day, but there is a right of review. If the complainer or the public body is unhappy with the decision, they can ask for the case to be looked at by me. There is not a huge number of such cases, but occasionally we will do a bit more investigation, and we are open to reopening a case in order to look at it further. That, combined with our quality assurance and the other measures that we have in place, is a much more cost-effective and effective system.

If a public body has said that it will do something and that addresses the issues that were found, and we then do an investigation, it could be quite a long time before somebody gets the remedy that they are due. In the round, we do not do 800 in-depth investigations, but I think that we get better outcomes now, because we focus our resources on where they are most needed.

09:15  

Okay. May I stick with that for a second? Let us say that 800 complaints were valid in the past and now the number is 192. Where do the others go? Are those complaints being pushed back to the public body—a local authority, for example? Members of public who make complaints to the ombudsman often think of the ombudsman as being their last port of call. They say, “We have to go to the ombudsman.” Do you write to those complainers to say, “We’re not dealing with that. We think it’s better dealt with locally by the public body or the council.”? If so, what message does that give to members of the public who want to use the ombudsman as an independent arbiter on some of those issues?

I am sorry; forgive me. I made an assumption. The process is that model complaints handling requires the public body to look at something first. If somebody comes to us with what we call a premature complaint, we will signpost them back. We can give help and support if they do not get a response.

Generally, a complaint comes to us when it has been through stage 2. The public body will have a complaint file, and it will have done an investigation. Often, the ones that we send back at the preliminary stage, when someone has made an inquiry and is wondering where they should go, do not come back to us.

We are, in effect, the third stage of the complaints process, and people know that. There is a duty on public bodies, under model complaints handling, to signpost people to us. However, the best and quickest remedies are often those that take place at the local level, because instant action can be taken. Local authorities in particular resolve a lot of their complaints at that very early stage. Basically, they just put things right.

I cannot remember the numbers. I do not know whether Andrew Sheridan can.

I will add a little bit to that.

Two things have helped to reduce those numbers. As Rosemary Agnew said, we have focused on signposting with public bodies and making sure that that takes place, but only after a complaint has gone through their process first.

I think that I said the last time I was here that we have relaunched our training offer for public bodies. We now offer two different courses, on good complaints handling and investigation skills. Through those courses, we have focused on what makes good complaints handling.

There has been a focus in all public bodies on putting their everyday complaints handlers through the good complaints handling course. Some 425 people have signed up in the past year. For the investigation skills course, we have had almost 500 officers from local authorities and bodies under our jurisdiction, and we take them through the whole process.

That is part of what we have taken from learning and improvement. We have taken things back to the public bodies and said, “This is what makes good complaint handling” to stop complaints escalating to us. Obviously, if somebody is still unhappy, there is signposting. We say, “This is what you should do. This is how you get to a good resolution, and this is how you agree on it.” We take people through that step by step.

We are going to start to refine that through sector-specific training. At the moment, we offer courses on good complaints handling and investigation skills, but the feedback that we are getting is that more specific examples would be helpful. We are seeing that impacting on the complaints that are coming through. People are handling them better at that stage.

Are the public happy with that change in emphasis? Are we tracking their overall satisfaction with the complaints process?

We have revised our approach to customer feedback. Traditionally, we asked for feedback only after we had done an investigation. Clearly, we now have a lot more closure points that mean that we do not proceed any further, so we will relaunch the feedback process next year. The two current indicators are complaints about our service and, probably more so, requests for reviews of initial decisions. Compared with the number of cases that we deal with, the number is very small. It is like everything else: there will be some people who are very unhappy, some who are very happy and those in between. The key is explaining and explaining well.

There is a communication challenge, because, although we are not saying that a complaint is unimportant—in fact, we are saying the exact opposite: the complaint is really important—it might be that we cannot do any more for the person. Sometimes, though not frequently, that ties in with the expectation of what an investigation can achieve. For example, after looking at a complaint about education, we cannot say that a teacher must be sacked. There are occasions when the outcome is not what somebody wants, but we are not talking about lots and lots of people. However, those people are often the most vociferous, which is absolutely right, because if we are not challenged, we will not review ourselves and look at whether we could have communicated better.

In relation to cases that are resolved or addressed and do not result in a large investigation, we are increasingly trying to find a resolution where both parties are happy with our intervention to put something right, as long as there is learning. A good example might relate to an issue with a housing repair. Rather than carry out an investigation into whether a housing association should have done it, we might just phone up the housing association and say, “We have this complaint. You have already acknowledged that this should have been done. Will you just put it right?” It sounds counterintuitive, but our approach has changed from being process focused to people focused, which can only be a good thing.

Niki, do you want to add anything?

The only thing that I want to add relates to premature complaints. When we receive premature complaints, we tend to signpost the complainant back to the public body. However, if it is clear that the process is very frustrated, that there is a long-running issue or that somebody is having real difficulties and challenges, we certainly take into account any vulnerabilities that the person is experiencing. We consider taking such cases, even if they are premature. We do not often do that, for the reasons that Andrew Sheridan explained, but we have the authority to do so.

As Rosemary Agnew said, we use the term “investigation” advisedly, but when it comes to cases that do not involve fully published investigations, 63 per cent of the cases on which we seek advice are at that initial advice stage. That illustrates that it is not that no investigatory work goes on in such cases; we seek professional advice and look at the cases carefully. In communicating our decisions, our findings are sometimes 16, 17 or 18 pages long—arguably too long—and incredibly detailed. As Rosemary Agnew said, the numbers and terms might not describe the extent of the work that goes on at that phase.

I certainly think that it is important to keep track of public satisfaction with the process, if that is possible.

My next question might yield the same answer, but I will ask it anyway. We have information that suggests that, last year, only 25 out of a possible 1,151 local authority complaints were closed after the investigation stage. Again, the question arises about why so few local authority complaints are investigated. It is quite a substantial difference. I invite you to explain that, if you can.

A range of things are assessed before we decide whether to proceed. Local authorities were the first to have model complaints handling procedures. They are also the network with which we have had the most contact over time. Part of the explanation is that we see good complaints handling in the first instance.

Another issue relates to the breadth of services that local authorities cover. As Niki Maclean described in relation to professional advice, with a lot of complaints—those on planning, for example—we are limited in what we can investigate. Our initial advice might be that everything that has happened up to that point is exactly what was said should have happened, so we would not proceed further in those cases.

I could not tell you chapter and verse why the figure is as you said, but I think that it is down to a combination of issues: the types of cases being so diverse, the length of time and the existence of a very active network group. Andrew Sheridan and his team work with that group, and it is good at sharing good practice and is proactive in comparing and monitoring stats and stuff like that. I think that it is something to do with the sector itself, as well as the complaints handling.

Andrew Sheridan, do you want to add anything about the network group?

I will just add that it is a very active network. When it meets, it splits into family groups that share trend analysis of the data that they have captured on complaints handling. They now actively share good practice with one another, now that we have established that conversation. We go along to support that and share more relevant or up-to-date examples of support and learning that have been put in place. As a network, it is now doing that itself in small family groups, and we are there to support that.

It is the network that probably engages most on any tweaks or changes that we make to guidance documents or information that is shared. It is quite embedded in the language, and it understands the process really well. Of all the networks, it is the one that is furthest down the route of good complaints handling, as Rosemary Agnew said, and good outcomes. It now focused on taking a more people-centred approach.

That said, we take nothing at face value, so we constantly monitor. Housing, education, social care and planning are the four areas in which we get the most complaints, and the complaints about education and social care tend to be the ones that are most likely to result in an investigation, because they can be more complex.

As I said, we take nothing at face value, so we monitor. By the end of quarter 2 this year, the number of local authority cases was up by 29 per cent. Significantly, for me, the premature rate—people coming to us before they have been through the process—is 28 per cent, which is slightly up. Before model complaints handling, it was 50 per cent. The figure is okay for this reporting year, but we are not complacent, and we will monitor it. However, we can only monitor what people bring to us. The other side of that is that, if you are not happy with something, please progress it to us.

Let me pick up on that. As I said, 25 out of 1,151 cases were closed. Can you give the committee and the public an assurance that the other 1,126 have not been dismissed and are being dealt with by someone in a different part of the complaints process?

I do not have the numbers to break that down by local authority, but we could do that afterwards, if it would help.

I will give you an indication of the cases for which we did not do a formal investigation—sorry, I am just trying to find the numbers. In the reporting year, 1,915 cases were closed after the initial stages. Of those, 1,288 were closed because of good complaint handling. Therefore, a significant number had already been through a good complaint process. In 376 cases, the investigation looked reasonable, although the complaint was not upheld, and we could see nothing more that could be achieved for the person. We resolved 44 cases, and our resolution rate is rising.

That means that the number of cases that we did not look at in great detail was very low—probably under 150. Of those, we accepted 110, but we sent them back. We said that they were valid complaints, but we formally returned them to the organisations and told them to investigate. Obviously, we talk to complainants when we do that.

Therefore, the vast majority of complaints involve some form of investigation, but they do not come under the formal investigation category. If I could change some of the language in the legislation, I would do so.

Thank you very much for your responses.

09:30  

Good morning, panel. In the past seven years, complaints regarding the services of the Scottish Public Services Ombudsman have doubled. The SPSO has largely put that down to the backlog, which is in the process of being cleared. What steps does the ombudsman plan to take to lower the volume of complaints? That question is for you, Rosemary.

That is a good question. I am not sure that I would necessarily try to lower the volume of complaints, as they are a valuable source of feedback. Of course, we would like fewer, as that would demonstrate that our service is there to be accessed.

In the past few years—at least, since I have been in post—we have adopted the equivalent of the model complaints handling procedure, with an identical two-stage process. Obviously, we cannot have a third stage, as that would involve the ombudsman, so we contract an independent person to do that third-stage investigation for us. That is the process, and we would treat that person’s findings, whatever they might be, as if they had been established by an ombudsman—that is, we would look for improvement and, obviously, feedback.

Delay has been a big issue, certainly in this reporting year; however, we have reduced the number of complaints in that respect, partly by reducing that delay but also by managing and communicating things better. Over and above that, I think that what we are seeing is a reflection of what all public service is seeing. There are other factors—it is not just about us. When a delegated decision is made, and there is a right of review, what we often see is the person engaging with the review process and then, if their complaint is still not upheld, their switching to a customer service complaint process. I completely understand that: you will try everything that you can to get the answer that you want to hear.

For me, part of this is about listening to what people have to say. We would like fewer complaints, because they use our resources, but it is important that we monitor the trends first of all and then monitor whether any specific subject areas are arising. As delay was the only theme that appeared throughout, we have tried to learn how to tackle it. There are delays not only in unallocated cases but in other areas of casework; indeed, one of the reasons for having unallocated cases has been the knock-on effect of investigations taking us longer. Because reviewers had more old cases, we could not allocate the new ones. We have done both together, and we are seeing a reduction in that respect.

With regard to other reductions, there is a combination of issues to address. For a start, it is not just about what is being complained about, but about the type of complaint itself. Very often, the same person is making the same complaint about everybody with whom they come into contact; I want to help them understand that we are giving them a good service, but that we cannot always tailor it 100 per cent to every person. We try to engage and make reasonable adjustments, as far as we can. At the beginning of a complaint process, we actively ask, “Is there anything you need us to do or communicate differently?” Sometimes, it ultimately comes down to the fact that we cannot please all of the people all of the time in every way, but we do try very hard.

You have said that, sometimes, the complainer can be the same, with complaints in the four areas or challenges that you have talked about. How often does that happen? Do you get a lot of repeat complainers rather than different—I would not say “new”—complainers?

It is not a huge number—we can probably recall who they have been over a two-year period. The issue is more to do with the volume of complaints and the similarity in what they complain about. Their complaints are often the same or very similar, and I find that quite challenging, because I want to help people move on. However, there comes a point when we—and the public body—can do no more.

It is not quite a non sequitur to talk about reducing times and constantly reviewing our processes—we do a lot more agile testing of new ways of working—but we are currently testing and working on a process to make sure that, instead of our taking 10 complaints over a few months, we address the basic and central issue. It is not that we do not want to take every complaint, but doing so does not help the complainer, fundamentally; it does not help us; and it sometimes does not help the public body, either, to have the same issue going round and round, sometimes for five or six years, without anybody getting any further on.

There is no single answer to this question. We try to do everything that we can while sticking to our value of being people focused.

Thank you.

Good morning, panel, and thank you for joining us. I want to return to the question that Willie Coffey asked about the trends that you outlined. Has there been any national analysis of what trends there have been since the SPSO took over the role of standardising complaint procedures in 2010?

You have to have data to analyse trends, and our engagement through the networks enables us to analyse trends in particular sectors. Like many sensible organisations, we do horizon scanning and look for wider societal trends, because there is often a correlation between those things and our complaint numbers. In the past two years, we have shifted our approach to how we use our information; Andrew Sheridan’s team has an insights officer, who is able to pull together all the bits of information—not just numbers but recommendations that have been made and the themes within recommendations. Indeed, communication is an eternal theme amongst all public bodies.

That also enables us to identify from our data whether, proportionally, we are getting more complaints from one public body or sector than another. We couple that with our support and intervention policy—with the focus on the support element—to see whether there is something that we can do or offer to that organisation or sector to address some of the trends. During the reporting period, we identified a trend of delays in health complaints—indeed, sometimes, they were not even being looked at—so we proactively wrote to national health service boards a couple of times to highlight the issue and to offer support on how to address it during the Covid lockdowns and times of high demand. As part of our policy, if an organisation needs to improve but is not doing anything, we have different powers to address the issue under the complaint standards.

At the moment, we cannot analyse the reports of all bodies, which is partly a resource issue and partly to do with the way in which the organisations are set up. We do it for the whistleblowing function, because that involves fewer public bodies and because there is a requirement to publish annual statistics in that respect. We incorporated in the whistleblowing standards an annual reporting requirement, so we see all the annual reports for whistleblowing.

What we do not see in the same way are all the wider annual reports, because we are simply not resourced to be able to say to every single public body, “Send us your annual reports so that we can analyse them.” Undoubtedly, there will be a technical solution to all of that somewhere down the line. I think that, when I was the Scottish Information Commissioner, we managed something along those lines, but, ultimately, it comes down to the benefit of doing it. Right now, we get enough from our own data to be able to do the intervention, the training and the development.

Thank you for that.

The relationship that you have developed—that is, of being closer to bodies that people are complaining about in order to try to speed up the process—has attracted comment. For example, in 2014, Professor Chris Gill, who is now at the University of Glasgow but was formerly at the SPSO, wrote about not only those new responsibilities and engagement with public service bodies but the need to demonstrate sufficient independence during that period. What safeguards are you making sure to embed in that process?

I would use the word “closer” advisedly, as it implies a different sort of relationship. If you look at our investigatory and welfare fund work, you will see that we make our decisions independently. Our findings are our findings, and they are not negotiable unless there is some form of material error—that is very clear. We do not talk to public bodies about specific cases, unless, obviously, we are investigating something.

Andrew Sheridan’s team has officers who give advice and guidance about complaint handling generally. It is almost as if there are two tramlines. The first is about our making it clear that, as much as we want to get on professionally, I am the ombudsman, you are a public body, and my staff and I act independently and objectively, while the other is about our wanting to improve the process for everybody, so we will give general advice, guidance and training.

It brings me back to something that Mr Coffey touched on. Our challenge at the moment is how we communicate on those cases that do not make it all the way through to the big investigation. We have to be able to convince and demonstrate to people that such decisions are taken independently; we do not go just on what the public body has said, simply because it said it. I think that we still have a challenge in communicating that. There are no Chinese walls—it is all about being professional and recognising the limits. We will always make decisions independently. If you were to take any of my investigation staff and cut them in half, they would say “independent” in the middle. We are all really conscious of that.

I am well aware of Professor Gill. His advice was very timely; with the complaints standards stuff, it would have been very easy to get too close. However, even with the network groups that we mentioned, we do not run those; instead, we are invited to go and speak to them, so we are not necessarily there for everything that they talk about.

At a different, more senior level, Niki Maclean and I have had to go and speak to public bodies about complaints handling or trends that we have noticed. In that case, it is a bit of a combination of the two tramlines that I mentioned. We say, “This isn’t good enough, but we’d like to be able to help you help yourself.”

I do not know whether that helps at all.

It does. I did not want to pick over all of Professor Gill’s comments, but I thought that they contained some interesting pointers, as you have said. He expressed a specific concern about the new responsibilities that SPSO has had since 2014, saying:

“we should be asking whether such roles will help or hinder the ombudsman institution in fulfilling its constitutional role”.

Have you considered the points raised in those comments, given your new responsibilities?

09:45  

If we are talking about what has happened since 2014, I should say that I became the ombudsman in 2017 and, since then, have taken on the whistleblowing stuff. We are also likely to develop child-friendly complaints.

The fact is that we learn so much from stakeholder engagement and from actually doing the work. It is very good advice to consider that relationship, as it alters slightly each time, but it is definitely a help, not a hindrance. It would be a hindrance, if you did not do it well or professionally. If you come at it with the approach that we take to our values and our strategic aims for learning and improvement, you see that it is about building capacity, too—not just our capacity, but the capacity of the complaints system. That takes us all the way back to the Crerar review, which recommended better complaint handling locally. They all fit together in a different way. It is definitely a help, though, not a hindrance.

That was helpful. Thank you.

I have a couple of questions around the public petition relating to the SPSO, which the Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee is considering. Among other things, the petition calls for an independent review to

“establish whether the current legislation governing the SPSO is fit for purpose.”

Given that you are also pushing for legislative change, I would be interested to hear whether you agree that, 20 years after the legislation to set up the SPSO, a review might be required. If so, who do you think should conduct that review?

How long have we got? I absolutely and fundamentally think that there should be a review. I have been trying, almost since I came into office, to get that review. There are a number of reasons for that. From a complainer point of view, the Scottish Public Services Ombudsman Act 2002 was written at a time when everybody did everything in writing and kept paper files. I do not think that it is adaptable enough, or as adaptable as it should be, for the different ways of delivering services and making complaints. Each time that we have had a new function, something has been added to the act. It is an incredibly messy piece of legislation to read now, and there is something about making it clearer. It is not just lawyers who read legislation.

Within that, though, there are some areas where, as an ombudsman’s service and organisation, we are not keeping up with our colleagues in other areas of the UK and across Europe. That relates to own-initiative investigations, which I will not go back to, because we have talked about them before. There are other things that would help, but they may not be as obvious. It almost goes back to the relationship point about being able to share information differently with other scrutiny and oversight bodies, because as public services become more complex, the scrutiny and oversight of those services becomes quite complicated. There needs to be a review of how those bodies are enabled to work together, because it is often the legislative things that get in the way.

I will leave the point about who should conduct a review to the greaters and betters, but I cannot see that parliamentary scrutiny of our legislation would go amiss.

It would certainly kick things up in the air or get things started, would it not? You mentioned that you are not going to go over the own-initiative investigative powers, and we discussed that when you were here earlier this year. Just to get it all on the record, can you say what you think the ombudsmen in Wales and Northern Ireland, for example, and other international schemes are able to do that you are not able to? Do you have a sense that the lack of own-initiative powers hinders your ability to fulfil your responsibilities?

I can investigate a complaint at whatever stage only if it is brought to me. If somebody does not complain, I cannot investigate. Under own-initiative powers, you are able to investigate of your own volition something that is in the public interest. Someone could say, “Can’t you research it now?”. You can, but own-initiative powers and the other things in the act that come with them, such as being able to compel evidence and information, enable you to focus on an issue, a demographic or a theme without having to focus on a particular public body. It also means that you can word an investigation in such a way as to get to the issue that you are trying to look at.

Sometimes, with complaints, you have to go with what the complainer is complaining about. The benefit of an own-initiative investigation is that you can do one investigation that is cross cutting in one way or another. You do not necessarily have to do this or that, but it can really highlight an issue or underlying themes that may prevent other complaints or help other complaints and complainers. The other benefit is that that is a far more effective use of resources. You might achieve with one investigation what you could not achieve with 10 or 20 complaints.

Fundamentally, the way in which you choose and decide what to investigate ties in with what Niki Maclean said about people who are in vulnerable situations. I am as interested in knowing why some people do not complain and whether the complaints system as a whole serves everybody as it should. You can look at very different issues. To go back to textbook phrases such as “A voice for the voiceless”, own-initiative investigations would give far more of a voice to the voiceless than our being able to look at only the complaints that come to us.

That is certainly a good point: not everybody complains, but there are people who are sitting on something with which they could really do with some help and support. Thanks for unpacking that a bit. It was very helpful.

Good morning, panel. Rosemary, in your opening remarks you touched on what you are doing to develop child-friendly complaints. You may want to expand on that a bit.

When we heard from you last year, you talked about vulnerable groups who did not make complaints, and you referenced them a second ago. We do not know what the barriers are to making complaints, but what are you doing to reach out to those groups and individuals?

This will not be in the most recent report, but, this year, we have partly refocused our stakeholder engagement strategy on trying to identify how we can get better contact. We have a number of individual initiatives, and I will ask Andrew Sheridan to talk about one that is related to data.

We have been working jointly with the Northern Ireland Public Services Ombudsman and a couple of academics, one of whom you know. They are looking specifically at how to identify people who are in vulnerable situations. We have had a couple of workshops with them. They will be developing some resources that we will host on our website to provide advice for public bodies. Although we would like to have greater contact, it is about how, on the front line, there is more support for complaints. It is a work in progress. I will ask Andrew Sheridan to talk about the data bit of it.

The insight officer in my team started to look at all the stats from last year. We pooled all the complaints that came in and broke them down by local authority, and we used the deprivation index to target the complaints that were coming from people in deciles 1 to 4, looking at the most vulnerable deciles to begin with. We drilled into that to look at from which sector the complaints in those deciles were more likely to come.

We now have a vast amount of data that will help us direct our engagement over the next year. For example, we can look at a local authority and see that people who are experiencing the most vulnerabilities in those deciles are more likely to complain about housing issues. That allows my team to engage with those public bodies and support them with what the issues are and how we can help them to have better complaints handling. The key thing that Rosemary Agnew touched on is the hidden data, and that is the bit that we are trying to pull out now. We can see the data across the 32 local authorities and, if a local authority does not have anybody in decile 1 and 2 complaining about a service, we can ask why that is the case. It might be that that public body is doing a fantastic job and there is nothing to complain about, but it might be that the process is not right for it.

We could go 100 miles an hour and go down every avenue on this, but we are trying to pull it back to look at how our materials are supporting public bodies and members of the public to access a service. Is it that the language is not right? Do we need to look at using easy-read materials? Do we need to look at how we are communicating to bodies that are under our jurisdiction, which relay information back to members of the public? Myriad projects can come out of the draft of data that we have pooled.

We have only been doing that this year, and the key factor for next year will be the engagement that comes out of that. That will be driven by the data, so my team will actively look at where we can have the biggest impact and where we will get the most from the data to improve complaints handling.

I talked about the fact that we do a lot of very quick small projects. For example, it is quite challenging to communicate with, and make complaints for, prisoners, so we completely reviewed the literature for prisoners and followed the advice, because there are low rates of literacy in prisons.

I assume that Marie McNair is still with us remotely even though I can only see her name showing.

We reframed that literature using guidance from the Dyslexia Association on how to communicate. There has not been a big-bang moment for everything; we are just trying to do it within our resource as much as we can individually.

We take all our welfare fund applications over the phone, whereas that is not the case at the first-tier review stage for local authorities. For example, some local authorities have freephone numbers, but not all of them do. As Rosemary Agnew said, the issue obviously is about providing easy access to our service, and we have worked really hard with our teams to make sure that, across all three areas of casework, that happens through regular training and feedback. It is also about how people access the public services themselves, and there is more work to do, particularly on the welfare fund.

One of my constituents raised an issue about a complaint not being accepted because it was made in the name of a local community council. What avenue does a community council have to make a complaint if it is about a local authority?

I would find it difficult to answer the question without it being obvious what I was talking about. Would it be possible for me to write to you about community councils? It is quite a complex area, and I would rather make sure that I give you the right answer than try to edge around it, if that is okay.

I would certainly welcome that. That would be really helpful. Thanks.

I will move on to my last question. Earlier in the year, you said that you had started to log complaints about housing repairs, specifically about dampness and mould. The committee is very interested in that. You said that the numbers were very low. Can you advise the committee of what you are doing to find out what complaints there are? Has there been a big jump in numbers?

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The first thing that we did was to start logging them in our case handling system. When we spoke to you in May, we had 10 cases logged; that figure is now 39. Obviously, they are going up. Statistically, what is interesting is that 17 of those were premature cases, which meant that the issue had not even been looked at or addressed at local level. That is probably due to a combination of not knowing where to complain and not knowing how to push that. We have cases in the pipeline, obviously. Some of them are still under investigation. In six of them, when the complaint about damp and mould was made, they were properly investigated at the local level and addressed.

We are finding that—this is a generalisation, and it is only a small number—organisations are responding to concerns. We have not had to do a really big in-depth investigation yet—I will always say “yet”. Some of that will be driven by the publicity about it and, because of the way in which the issue has emerged publicly, it is less likely that we will see a public body not looking into a case, because of the implications. At the moment, we are tracking the cases and saying, “Watch this space.” Yes, they have almost quadrupled in number.

Thanks for that. Back to you, convener.

That is the end of our questions, but you said at the beginning that you wanted to cover certain areas. We have a little time, so, if there is anything that you want to highlight or make sure that we really hear, you are welcome to do that.

Certainly, what I have been hearing from you is that you are taking, in general, a very proactive approach and doing pre-emptive work, all of which is being effective, and you are going for a people-centred approach. I love the idea that, rather than being stuck with the process and following that to the end, you are actually looking for the solution for people and meeting that need. It is tremendous that that is beginning to work out.

I want to highlight a couple of things. The first is the work on the Independent National Whistleblowing Officer. I am sort of running out of voice. Niki Maclean, would you like to do that and touch on the current state of unallocated cases? There is good news there.

I am happy to give a brief update on INWO, which is in its second year. A lot of work, including work with boards, went into the preparation for that. Earlier, we talked about the annual reporting process. Unlike with public service complaints, we have been able to analyse the first set of annual reports on INWO, and that has been able to direct the activity that we have undertaken with boards, including producing guidance for them on what they need to consider.

At the moment, one of the challenges for boards is how they report the learning from the cases while protecting the confidentiality of the parties involved. We are still learning from that. We had a successful second speak up week in October, where the focus was on how you ensure that you are driving learning and improvement from those cases and sharing that more widely across organisations.

Some of the investigations are proving to be complex in nature, and we are using a wider range of investigative techniques than we would normally use on public service complaints. Our INWO team is a relatively small team of around five people. There is learning on our part, and, as we undertake cases, we are working well with public bodies and carrying out reflective reviews of them. You will see from our website that we publish findings.

All that is just to highlight the fact that there is still work to do in this second year. We are very much finding our feet in the investigative processes that we use.

Thanks for that. That sounds like a positive direction. I remember seeing promotion for the speak up week in October, so it cut through, even for someone who is very busy.

Finally, I know that the committee has an interest in our unallocated cases. As of yesterday, 288 cases were awaiting allocation. Those are obviously not the same 288 that there were at the beginning of the year. That figure is in the context of a 40 per cent increase in the number of cases coming in.

The systems that we have put in place are working effectively. It is marginally under four months before some cases—I have to stress the “some”, because we prioritise cases, and they will be allocated in half that time—are allocated. It is not ideal, but we are still seeing the direction of travel, and it has been a helpful learning experience for us in how we manage that and keep the throughput of work going. At the same time, we are still working on making sure that we do not have lots of older complaints by the end of the year. The direction of travel is still right. I had hoped that it would be a little quicker, but I did not anticipate quite such a big rise as 40 per cent.

That is great—thanks for that update. Willie Coffey wants to come in.

I will follow up briefly on Marie McNair’s question on dampness and mould. Are you aware of authorities that still regard complaints from tenants about dampness and mould as being about condensation and therefore do not categorise them as dampness and mould? We have had that problem for many years, and some of us who have served in local authorities have experience of it. It appears that dampness and mould was not recognised as a danger that should prevent a council from allocating a house in that condition. I would not like to think that it is still the case that people’s complaints about dampness and mould are being disregarded as being about condensation only. Could you say anything about that and about whether we are gathering such complaints fully and properly now?

I do not have the data to say absolutely one way or the other. It is unfortunate, in a way, that dampness, mould and condensation are three different things—they may cause each other, but they are not necessarily the underlying issue. I would come at it from a slightly different perspective. We are seeing better handling of complaints about those issues generally, and, in fact, no complaint that has come to us in the current year—we are tracking it this year—has raised that as a major issue. That does not mean that such complaints will not reach us, but the theme, as I recognised it in the past, has not come through.

I am sorry—I was looking at our policy officer who knows the cases in more detail than I do. Dampness and mould have not been raised through a case, but we will alert our teams to make sure that we look out for it so that we can capture it as an issue.

Okay. Thanks for that.

That concludes our questions. It has been helpful to hear from the SPSO again, and I am glad that we were able to move the session to this side of the year, when the report is fresh in your mind, rather than six months on. Thank you very much for your evidence today. I will briefly suspend the meeting to allow for a change of witnesses.

10:09 Meeting suspended.  

10:13 On resuming—