Meeting documents

To be presented by Kate Reed, Customer Complaints Team Manager and Carolyn Scholes, Complaints Officer.

The Chairman welcomed Ms K Reed, Corporate Complaints Manager and Ms C Scholes, Complaints Officer to the meeting.

Ms Reed presented part 1 of the report, summarised a number of the key performance items and explained the following key points:

·         The report covered all corporate complaints other than those in relation to social care.

·         There had been a change from a 3 stage to a 2 stage process for complaints during the reporting period but it was too early to gauge the impact of this on the numbers being received.

·         The report provided trend data for the past 3 years.

·         There had been a drop in the number of compliments received in 2015/16 compared to the previous year and the service was looking at ways to understand and improve this.

·         The report included information on enquiries where the complaints team had facilitated a reply. Enquiries were contacts from people who were unhappy with the service they had received but wanted to provide feedback rather than complain or where the contact was outside the jurisdiction of the complaints process. 

·         The complaints team would normally contact the person making an enquiry to check whether or not they wanted to make a formal complaint.

·         Around 60% of stage 1 complaints were about Transport for Buckinghamshire (TfB) and this was consistent with previous years.

·         The main area that people complained about was communication issues. The complaints team was working with individual service areas to help address this.

Ms Scholes went onto address part 2 of the report and explained that:

·         Sixty complaints had been referred to the Local Government Ombudsmen (LGO), 5 of which had been upheld.

·         The numbers being referred to the LGO varied each year sometimes because something new had been introduced or new issues had come to light that people were not happy about.

·         There was an increasing trend in social care and special educational needs complaints going onto the final stage or to the LGO.

·         Once a complaint had been considered by the LGO then it would be closed and not re-opened or reconsidered.

In response to a question about benchmarking complaints information with other Councils, Ms Reed explained that this was difficult to do given the differing complaints procedures each Council had in place. However the Service was in touch with other local authorities to share information and if it could be shown that comparator data was useful and reliable this would be included in future complaints reports.

Ms Reed explained that the corporate complaints team would ensure that they clearly differentiated between enquires and complaints in respect of Transport for Bucks (TfB).

There was a further discussion about providing more detail of TfB complaints in subsequent reports and whether the Cabinet Member for Transportation and an officer from TfB should attend the Committee during the discussion.

RESOLVED

The Committee NOTED the report and AGREED that further detail of TfB complaints be discussed in future and that the Cabinet Member for Transportation and a representative from TfB be present for the discussion.