Agenda item

At the last meeting of the Committee, the Director of Information and Customer Access was requested to attend the meeting to present the revised monitoring information on the corporate complaints system.  A copy of a report to the Operations Board and the revised monitoring information is attached.  

Further to Minute No 29 of the meeting held on 10 April 2014, members considered a copy of a report to the Operations Board on the revised monitoring information that was now provided for the Corporate Complaints System.  The Director of Finance and the Director of Information Services attended the meeting to present the report.

The responsibility for Customer Services (including corporate complaints) had recently transferred from the Director of Information Services to the Director of Finance and both Directors had a number of years’ experience of dealing with corporate complaints.

Following discussion and questions the following points were noted:-

·         The Council had an ethos of accepting complaints and, given the high volume of daily transactions with the public, the number of complaints received was comparatively low.

·         There was also a low volume of complaints which escalated from Stage 1 to Stage 2 in the complaints process.

·         Complaints were logged and routed to one of the 4 Departmental Complaint Officers (2 of those being the statutory required adults and children’s complaints functions).  These officers were now meeting regularly to review progress in dealing with complaints and to discuss emerging themes and share good practice. A revised monitoring report was being submitted to corporate directors on a quarterly basis.

·         There was now a requirement, as part of the new monitoring arrangements, for departments to identify the service improvements identified in response to a complaint.

·         Directors were encouraged to carry out spot checks on the responses to complaints to ensure consistency and compliance with corporate standards.

·         The new monitoring arrangements had recently been used as an opportunity to raise the profile of the corporate complaints system.

·         Improvements planned for the future were to:-

o    undertake further training to ensure that service users’ ‘comments on a service were not necessarily recorded as a complaint that needed to be dealt with under the corporate complaints system.

o   progress the checking of the quality of responses to complaints under Stage 1 of the procedure, as experience had shown that poorly worded and/or confusing responses could lead to complaints escalating from Stage 1 to Stage 2. 

o   capture ‘complaints’ received from third parties such as MPs and Councillors which were not submitted under the corporate complaints process.

·         Where a complaint contained a number of issues, Customer Services Officers assigned the complaint to a lead officer who then co-ordinated the various responses to all elements of the complaint.

·         There was also further work to be undertaken on managing customers’ expectations to avoid a complaint on a service standard being submitted prematurely, particularly where the service response standard had not been exceeded.

Members felt reassured that the new monitoring and reporting arrangements were addressing a number of concerns expressed at the last meeting.  Members made the following comments and suggestions:-

·         The monitoring report should include an analysis of whether complaints were dealt with within the prescribed timescales.

·         The complaints system should be able to provide a robust mechanism for providing information and dealing with complaints from service users whose first language was not English or where language was a barrier to effective communication.

·         It was important when services were contracted out that the contract required the provider to have a robust complaints system in place to deal with service issues.

·         It would be useful for members to have guidance on how to deal with constituents’ complaints where services had been commissioned on behalf of the Council or contracted out to external providers.

RESOLVED:

1)    That whilst the new reporting and monitoring arrangements have provided some re-assurance, further quarterly monitoring reports should be submitted to the Committee until such time as all their previous concerns had been satisfied.

2)    That an analysis of whether complaints are dealt with within the prescribed time scales be incorporated into the statistical analysis of the report.