|
Discover how your Council has performed in
Ombudsman's complaint statistics
PEOPLE in the North West can examine the complaints made
to the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman about their local authorities
in the past year.
The Ombudsman investigates complaints about all local authorities and social
care providers in England. Every year it publishes the information it sends to
Councils to help with transparency and improve local services for residents.
This annual summary is the number of complaints and enquiries it has received
about the Council, and the decisions made about those complaints.
In the
North West Region:-
► The North West
Region received 1,919 complaints about Councils in the North West last year.
► The North West Region upheld 53%, which follows the national trend.
► The highest uphold rate in the North West was in the area of Children's Services
and Education at 65%.
► The lowest uphold rate was in Planning at 33%.
Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman, Michael King, said:-
"Our
annual data release is a great opportunity for the public, Councillors and
Council Officers to gauge how their local authority responds to, and learns
from, the complaints we receive about them.
The best Councils use our data to scrutinise the services they provide. I urge
all Councils to do that to make their services better in future.
I want to encourage an open and mature attitude to complaints - 1 where they
are valued within organisations as 'free feedback' and learning opportunities.
Indeed, how an organisation deals with complaints says a lot about its culture.
The data we have issued, and wealth of information we publish on our website,
are a valuable source of information about complaints handling and Council
performance. I would urge people to take a look to see how they can use it to
improve or scrutinise their authority's performance."
While issuing the figures this week, the Ombudsman is keen to point out that a
high number of complaints does not necessarily mean a Council is performing
poorly. It may indicate an authority that welcomes and encourages feedback,
through a transparent system which signposts people appropriately when its own
processes have been exhausted.
This year (2016 to 2017) the Ombudsman received over 16,500 complaints and enquiries
about Council's. The greatest proportion were about Education and Children's
Services, followed by Adult Social Care, and Planning
It's not just about numbers though. What matters is the outcome of the
complaints investigated in detail and over the year, across England, the
Ombudsman upheld 54%. This is up from 51% in 2015 to 2016, and 46% the previous year.
The region with the highest proportion of complaints upheld was London (60%),
and the lowest was the East Midlands (44%).
Overall, the Ombudsman was most likely to find fault in Adult Social Care cases
(64% upheld), and least likely to find fault in complaints about Planning and
Development (35% upheld).
One of the Ombudsman's main roles is to remedy injustice, and try to put people
back in the position they would have been in, had the fault not occurred. This
year, the Ombudsman made 3,562 recommendations to put things right. This
included apologies, financial remedies (for example paying for care which should
have been provided) and procedural changes to help improve services for others.
|
