Meeting documents

To be presented by Mrs K Mitchelmore, Team Leader Customer Complaints

Mrs K Mitchelmore, Team Leader Corporate Complaints and Mrs C Scholes, Complaints Officer attended the committee to present the annual report on Compliments and Complaints.

Mrs Mitchelmore highlighted the following points:

·           It was the first time that the new annual report had been reported to the committee, this was now a combined report covering complaints and compliments across the organisation

·           Complaints were a 2/3 and compliments 1/3 of the overall number submitted

·           Both compliments and complaints had seen an increase on 2016/17

·           There were three complaints procedures all with different response times.  The corporate response time being 28 days with the average response time being 31.8 days

·           Mrs Mitchelmore highlighted the overview of Children’s and Adult Social Care complaints as detailed in the report.  Mrs Mitchelmore stated that the both these areas were complex which could explain the longer response times and those not being addressed at the first stage

·           Most common causes for complaints to be submitted were quality of service, communication issues, staff conduct and the outcome of a decision or assessment

Mrs C Scholes highlighted the following points:

• Stage 2 corporate complaints were significantly up on last year, although 18 of these were in relation to a single issue, where members of the public had been encouraged to complain to the Council
• Highlighted the stage 1 complaints that had been escalated with 13 partially upheld and eight were fully upheld.  This could show the need to improve stage 1 handling of complaints
• The importance of the quality of responses and not just the turnaround time
• The Ombudsman were now called the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman.  Out of the 59 cases reviewed by the Ombudsman this year eight were upheld (in comparison to five last year)

Mrs Mitchelmore updated the Committee that there was currently a review of the corporate complaints process.  Workshops had taken place and an Improvement Plan had been developed.  The main areas of improvements were highlighted as follows:

• Improving internal response time from 28 days to 10 calendar days which went live on 1 October 2017 for stage 1 complaints

• Improvements in the quality of responses
• Strengthen accountability in Business Units
• Improved learning
• A lead officer within each Business Unit
• Procuring a new IT system to record and respond to complaints

The Committee raised and discussed the following points:

• The importance of ensuring continuous improvements through lessons learnt and in particular how this would link to outcomes.
• Indicators to allow the team to report against quarterly.  Mrs Mitchelmore confirmed that this was all part of the Improvement Plan.
• The committee discussed what made a complainant persistent or vexatious and how this was assessed.  Mrs Mitchelmore confirmed that the policy set this out and would allow staff to manage complaints in a better way.  The Chairman requested that the Policy for Vexatious and Persistent complainants be bought back to committee for review.

Action: Mrs Mitchelmore

• The 28 day response deadline was discussed and the need for this to be brought down in line with other authorities.  In particular response times in TEE were discussed as currently an average of 37 days.  The committee questioned if there were particular areas that are creating these delays and if some analysis could be completed.

Action: Mrs Mitchelmore

• The analysis of the Council’s statistics showed quality of service as the biggest factor; although Mrs Mitchelmore confirmed that the statistics did encompass a wide range of complaints across all service areas.
• The need to define quality of service against statutory obligation versus aspirations was also discussed.  It was suggested that ASC (Adult Social Care) and CSC (Childrens Social Care) in particular had information for service users that outlined the difference between the two.  Mrs Mitchelmore agreed to feed this back to colleagues.

Action: Mrs Mitchelmore

• The Committee asked for an update on how the Improvement Plan was progressing in particular lessons learnt.

Action: Mrs Mitchelmore

RESOLVED:  The Committee NOTED the report.