Issue - meetings

To  provide  the  Committee  with  the  most  recent  annual  letter  to  the  Council  from  the  Local Government  and  Social  Care  Ombudsman  (LGSCO).    The letter  relates  to  complaints processed by the LGSCO in the financial year 2023/24.  It is intended to establish a practice through which these annual letters are reported to this Committee in the future and, thereby, to extend  awareness  of  such  complaints  and  the  opportunity  for  learning  by  the  Council  from complaints.

The Committee considered a report of the Assistant Director (Governance) (A.2) which provided it with the most recent annual letter to the Council from the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman (LGSCO).  That letter related to complaints processed by the LGSCO in the financial year 2023/24.  It was intended to establish a practice through which those annual letters were reported to this Committee in the future and, thereby, to extend awareness of such complaints and the opportunity for learning by the Council from complaints.

Members were informed that the Annual Letter from the LGSCO was normally issued in mid-July, with this year’s letter being issued on 17 July 2024.  The letter set out a summary for the previous financial year of the numbers of complaints received by the LGSCO concerning this Council, which services they related to, the decisions reached in the year on complaints made to it and compliance with recommendations from it on upheld complaints.  The 2024 Letter from the LGSCO (in respect of 2023/24) was set out at Appendix A to the report (A.2). 

It was reported that the Annual Letter was sent by the LGSCO to the Chief Executive, the Leader of the Council and the Chairman of this Council’s Resources and Services Overview and Scrutiny Committee.  A brief summary of the statistics from the Annual Letter, and the upheld complaints identified in the Annual Letter for the year concerned, had been submitted to the Chief Executive’s Officer Management Team, as part of developing learning across the various upheld complaints. From this year’s Annual Letter, and by comparison with the same letters received in 2021, 2022 and 2023, a comparison had been produced which was set out in the ‘Background’ section of the report.

The Committee was made aware that, where an individual report on a particular complaint to the LGSCO had identified maladministration, the Monitoring Officer was under a duty to report to Cabinet (in respect of executive functions) or Council (in respect of non-executive functions). The Annual LGSCO letters had been referenced in reports on individual upheld complaints to Cabinet and Council.  Currently, there was no established practice to report Annual Letters to a body of Councillors to consider.  Through this report, it was proposed for this Committee to take on this role, as part of its terms of reference related to: ‘assess external regulatory reports and monitoring any quality improvement programmes where required.  Comments are provided to Cabinet as appropriate’. 

The Committee was also advised that there was an intention to review the Council’s corporate complaints procedure, following a similar review of the Council’s procedure for complaints made in respect of the Council’s role as landlord (the Housing Complaints Procedure).  Council Housing complaints generally fell within the scope of the Housing Ombudsman and not the LGSCO.  However, this was not always the case (and this was relevant when looking at the summaries of cases referenced in the ‘Background’ section of this report).  The LGSCO had recently adopted a new Complaint Handling  ...  view the full minutes text for item 46