Agenda item

The Committee received a report which summarised Member Enquiries, complaints, Ombudsman caseload and FOI activity alongside performance from 1 April 2021 to 31 March 2022. The report was set out in the agenda pack at pages 71 to 92. An amendment to the published section 4 of the report was provided in the addendum report pack at page 11. The report was introduced by Cllr Seema Chandwani, Cabinet Member for Tackling Inequality and Residents Services. Kirsten Webb, Customer Experience Manger, Andy Briggs, AD for Corporate & Customer Services, and Elaine Prado, Head of Customer Experience and Operations, were present for this item. Beverley Tarka, Director of Adult Social Care was also present. The Cabinet Members for: Housing Services, Private Renters and Planning; Children, Schools and Families; and Health Social Care and Wellbeing were all present for this item.

The following arose during the discussion of this report:

a.    The Committee queried about the time lag in the report, given that the figures related to 2021-22. In response, officers advised that in the past these reports had been submitted around October but that since Covid there had been delays in receiving information from the Ombudsman and other statutory services as they were still catching up. Officers advised that they hoped the 2022-23 report would be produced earlier in the year and that they would also be looking to revise its format, so that it was not so backwards looking.

b.    The Committee sought assurances about the drop off in performance in relation to the percentage of complaints replied to on time in Children’s Services and in Adults. The Committee also queried what lessons had been learned and the extent to which these figures could have been worse without Covid. In response the Cabinet Member for Children, Schools and Families acknowledged the low scores and advised that there was work underway to better understand how the figures had been calculated and how to improve. A working group had been set up to look at this issue. It was commented that children’s social care complaints could often be complicated and that this would likely impact performance. There was a statutory 20 day turnaround timescale for these complaints, which could have an impact on the performance scores in relation to other services. There were also complaints that would be complicated by legal proceedings and the time taken to progress these cases through the courts. The Council had employed an officer dedicated to resolving complaints and it was hoped this would help improve scores going forward.

c.    In relation to the above question, the Cabinet Member for Health Social Care and Wellbeing acknowledged that nobody thought that these figures looked good and that work was being undertaken to look at how service requests were handled to ensure that they did not turn into complaints. The Committee was advised that work was being done to look at how service requests/complaints were dealt with at the front end, how they were responded to and how they were tracked through the system. The Director set out that staff were working to ensure that they did everything they could to improve performance.

d.    The Committee commented that they found the report hard to scrutinise and that they would have liked to see more information that allowed them to drill down on specific service areas and understand the context behind the numbers of complaints. In response, the Cabinet Member for Tackling Inequality and Resident Services advised that it was up to the panel chairs to set out how they would like to scrutinise complaints in future and that panel chairs could use complaints as the basis for the areas they chose to scrutinise in future. If there was a structural issue about a lack of data this should be taken forward by the panels as part of future reports.

e.    In response to a questions about a high volume of parking complaints, the Cabinet Member advised that although the overall number of complaints was relatively high (716), it had to be seen in the context of around 1.5 million contacts a year for parking. In that context it was less than 0.05% of parking contacts that resulted in a complaint. Officers also advised that 2021 was the year that the Taranto system went live and that this would have been a factor in the overall numbers of complaints received about parking.

f.     The Committee sought assurances about increased scores for dissatisfaction with policies or decisions and what this said about the Council’s approach to co-production. In response, the Cabinet Member for Health, Social Care & Wellbeing commented that she did not think from these scores that it was possible to extrapolate that residents were necessarily disappointed with the policy direction of the Council, as this was historic data and that a lot of work was being done on the customer experience and through the Haringey Deal to address some of the underlying concerns. The Cabinet Member also set out that it was hard to know which policy decisions residents may or may not be dissatisfied with from the data as presented. Officers drew Members’ attention to section 3.16 onwards of the report, which set out what actions were being taken to improve performance going forwards. 

g.    The Chair enquired whether Task could be used in relation to the dedicated casework system that was being sought. In response, the Cabinet Member advised that Task had limited functionality and that what was being sought was a system that allowed different services to see the same information and draft response to enquiries, at the same time.

h.    In relation scrutinising future reports and how improvements were being made, the Committee was advised that going forwards all Member Enquiries, FOIs, stage one complaints would all be signed off by the appropriate Assistant Director, which was at a more senior level than had been done previously. It was envisaged that this would improve the quality of responses.

i.      The Chair requested that the Committee receive an update report on how the work to improve complaints and how they were handled was going, say in six to nine months.

j.      The Vice-Chair put forward a number of recommendations in relation to how future complaints reports could be improved, which were agreed by the Committee:

·         That all panel chairs restart their quarterly finance/performance briefings and that this should include complaints and learning from the complaints.

·         That future complaints reports include a section on how communication with residents can be improved following learning from the complaints received and how the services are improving their offer.

·         That future complaints reports include a more in-depth breakdown of service areas and how each service area is looking at the information it is gathering, how it can improve and whether any changes to services have been made following the learning from the complaints process.

·         Member Enquires part of the complaints report needs to have a section on whether a second or third follow up ME was needed following the initial request. Does this indicate the original level of information wasn’t good enough? What is being done in areas that continually have a high number of follow up ME’s?

·         Where stage 1 complaints are not being answered within the time frame, what does this tell us about the staffing needed to respond to the complaints and what does this tell us about the complexity of the complaint?

·         In relation to Ombudsman cases, this should include an in depth understanding of the specific service failure and how this is being addressed to ensure it doesn’t reoccur. Is there a pattern over the years from complaints that indicates services were not up to standard and could the Ombudsman investigation have been foreseen? How does this learning help the council going forward in collating patterns within complaints.

RESOLVED

That the report was noted and feedback given on how to focus in-year complaints monitoring.