Ombudsman threatened council three times with witness summons amid concerns at resourcing of complaints function

The Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman took the rare step of three times threatening Shropshire Council with a witness summons before receiving adequate responses to enquiries about public complaints.

In his annual letter to chief executive Andy Begley, Ombudsman Michael King said: “During the year, my investigators have raised concerns about your council’s responses to our enquiries; more than three quarters of our enquiries were not responded to within the requested timescales.

“Significantly, in three cases, we had to threaten to issue a witness summons to elicit the information we required. I do not take such action lightly and will usually only consider a witness summons where a council has not provided a response after considerable time and despite our continued efforts.”

Mr King said he recognised the pressures on councils but said delays to investigations “add to the frustration experienced by complainants and can cause further avoidable distress and uncertainty”.

He said Shropshire should “reflect on its practices and take the necessary steps to improve its liaison with my office”.

The council appeared to have under-resourced its complaint functions and the Ombudsman urged Shropshire “to consider how your organisation prioritises complaints, particularly in terms of capacity and visibility”.

Overall, 42% of complaints investigated about Shropshire were upheld, below the national average of 64%, and Mr King said he was satisfied in all cases that the council successfully implemented his recommendations.

Tim Collard, Shropshire’s monitoring officer, said: “Shropshire Council deals with a large number of enquiries from the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman every year.

“These range from straightforward requests for more information about a complaint to detailed investigations which require extensive research and collation of considerable volumes of information.”

The council was normally allowed 28 days to respond to an investigation, whether the issue is current or an historical complaint with no immediate implications.

Mr Collard explained: “Unfortunately it is not always possible to comply with these timescales given that service areas within the council need to deal with these Ombudsman’s enquiries on top of their day to day responsibilities to the public and local communities.

“Where we need additional time we liaise with the investigator to seek an extension in which to respond, but even then it can sometimes proves challenging for any number of reasons including complexity of the issues, the volume of documentation involved and key staff sickness.”

He said the three cases that saw threats of witness summonses arose in each of children’s services, adult social care and planning and in two of these the Ombudsman ultimately found no fault.

The situations had been unfortunate but by time of the threats Shropshire had almost completed preparing detailed responses and collating “the many hundreds of pages of supporting documentation, so that it was never a real risk that a witness summons would actually have to be issued”.

Mr Collard said the council would try to improve its response times to Ombudsman enquiries.

Mark Smulian