21 June 2006

Mr P Bungard

Chief Executive

Gloucestershire County Council

DX 133275

GLOUCESTER 11

Our ref: JRW/SJF/

(Please quote our reference when contacting us)

If telephoning contact: Mr R Stephen on 024 7682 0035

If using email send to: [email address]

Dear Mr Bungard

Annual Letter 2005/06

I am writing to give you my reflections on the complaints received against your authority and dealt with by my office over the last year. I hope that in reviewing your own performance you will find this letter a useful addition to other information you hold highlighting how people experience or perceive your services.

This year we will publish the letters on our website and share them with the Audit Commission as there was widespread support from authorities for us to do this. We will wait for four weeks after this letter before making it more widely available in these ways to give you an opportunity to consider and review the letter first. If a letter is found to contain any factual inaccuracy we will reissue it.

In addition to the narrative below there are two attachments which form an integral part of this letter: statistical data covering a three year period and a note to help the interpretation of the statistics.

Complaints received

As I have commented in previous years, fluctuations in complaint numbers are to be expected, and this year, my office received 35 complaints against your Council. This is an increase over last year, but similar to the number in 2003/4.

The proportion of complaints by subject has remained more or less constant. The subject with the most complaints (14) was Education as in previous years. Of these 12 were about school admission appeals and the other two concerned Special Educational Needs.

We received six complaints about Planning this year, but four of these related to one particularly contentious development proposal.

Decisions on complaints

We determined 28 substantive complaints against the Council this year. Another five were considered to be premature and were sent to the Council for investigation.

Reports and local settlements

When we complete an investigation we must issue a report. But there are a significant proportion of investigations that do not need to be completed because a `local settlement' is reached during the course of the investigation and it is therefore discontinued.

For the third year running I did not find it necessary to issue any reports against the Council. Three complaints resulted in local settlements, to which the Council readily agreed.

The Council apologised and paid a complainant £500 compensation because by error it had revealed his identity to the person about whom he had made a complaint relating to planning enforcement matters. I considered that this was appropriate, although I recognised that the complainant felt it was insufficient.

In another planning case, the Council agreed the complainant's proposal for the formation of a new access to the highway. However, when he applied to the relevant District Council for planning permission including the access, the Council gave different advice to the planning authority. The permission granted contained a condition which contradicted the agreement already reached between the Council and the complainant, who had to make a further application for variation of the condition. The Council reimbursed his costs for the second application and paid for his time and trouble, a total of £160.

In a social services case, the Council accepted my view that the complainants had not been properly informed about the nature of an arrangement for fostering which it had entered into with them. It agreed to pay compensation of £435.

In all, the Council paid £1,095 compensation in respect of complaints I upheld.

Other findings

Of the other 25 decisions, I found no or insufficient evidence of maladministration in 15. Twelve of these were education complaints. Eight complaints were considered to be outside my jurisdiction, two in highways, three in other (consumer protection and land), two in planning and one in social services. Two education complaints were discontinued at my discretion.

Your Council's complaints procedure and handling of complaints

The number of premature complaints continued to be low at only 15%. This compares favourably with the national average of 27%. It indicates that the public are aware of your Council's complaints process and are able readily to access it. Only two of the premature complaints referred to the Council were re-submitted to me afterwards and neither of these was upheld. I note that although the Council's website includes details of how to contact my office, there is no link to the Commission's website. I hope the Council will consider including the relevant hyperlink in the coming months.

Training in complaint handling

Our training in complaint handling is proving very popular with authorities and we continue to receive very positive feedback from participants. Over the last year we have delivered more than 100 courses from the range of three courses that we now offer as part of our role in promoting good administrative practice.

Effective Complaint Handling was the first course we developed, aimed at staff who deal with complaints as a significant part of their job. Since then we have introduced courses in complaint handling for front line staff and in handling social services complaints.

I am pleased to see that your Council took advantage of our offer of training. We delivered the Effective Complaint Handling course and the Good Complaint Handling for Front Line Staff course during the year. I hope that the staff involved found the courses beneficial.

I have enclosed some information on the range of courses available together with contact details for enquiries and bookings, in case you would like us to undertake training for more of your staff in the future.

Liaison with LGO

I am pleased to see that the trend of improving response times has continued. The average time taken this year was 32 days, despite the fact that we made more enquiries than in the previous two years. The responses to enquiries on education complaints was 27 days against our target of 28 days, but unfortunately Social Services responses were slower than last year at 47 days. Staff in Legal and Democratic Services who co-ordinate the responses are conscientious in keeping my staff up to date with progress on responses, which is helpful. But I do hope that the Council will make every effort to meet our target in the coming year.

Conclusions/general observations

I welcome this opportunity to give you my reflections about the complaints my office has dealt with over the past year. I hope that you find the information and assessment provided useful when seeking improvements to your Council's services. I would again very much welcome any comments you may have on the form and content of the letter.

I would again be happy to consider requests for myself or a senior colleague to visit the Council to present and discuss the letter with councillors or staff. We will do our best to meet the requests within the limits of the resources available to us.

I am also arranging for a copy of this letter and its attachments to be sent to you electronically so that you can distribute it easily within the council and post it on your website should you decide to do this.

Yours sincerely

J R White

Local Government Ombudsman

Enc: Statistical data covering a three year period

A note to help the interpretation of data

A note about training from the Local Government Ombudsman

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Mr P Bungard