Agenda item

To consider the annual update to provide assurance that complaints are managed effectively and determine whether any further action is required.

15.1          The report of the Head of Corporate Services, circulated at Pages No.44-57, provided the annual review of complaints received for scrutiny by the Committee in accordance with the complaints framework which was introduced in April 2016.

15.2          In presenting the report, the Head of Corporate Services indicated that Members were being asked to consider the annual update to gain assurance that complaints were managed effectively and to identify any further action required. He indicated that the report was very detailed and therefore he would only pick out the key aspects; Paragraph 2.1 on Page No.46 showed that 200 complaints had been received of which 178 related to Council Services; 164 were actual complaints whilst 14 were just simple service requests; of the 164 complaints, 135 had been responded to on time which resulted in an 82% response rate with 27 being answered out of time which was over the 20 working days. Paragraph 2.2 of the report showed that only 15 complaints had been escalated to Stage 2 where the complainant was not happy with the first response which the Head of Corporate Services felt was quite positive. The breakdown of the complaints by service area was shown at Appendix 1, on Page No.52, and it was not really surprising that the higher profile service areas generated most of the complaints which was an inherent risk of their service delivery; for example there were 89 complaints about waste and recycling, 11 about grounds maintenance, revenues and benefits had 22 complaints and planning 23; the figures for 2018/9 were shown in brackets. Paragraph 3.1 detailed the number of complaints reported in previous years so 2019/20 was very much on par with the previous year of 2018/19. Moving onto Paragraph 4.1, complaints were bench marked against other authorities through LG Inform, which consisted of over 50 other authorities and showed that the Council’s performance against other authorities, was very strong as highlighted in the chart. Paragraph 5.1 showed compliments that had been received again shown in chart format on Page No. 48; these were spread across service areas although one of the areas had not been properly populated and should be amended to read “Tewkesbury Leisure Centre”. In terms of the Ombudsman report, which was on Pages No. 49-50, Paragraph 6.1-2, only 11 complaints had been referred to the Local Government Ombudsman which again was very positive. The Head of Corporate Services apologised for the fact that the pie chart shown under Paragraph 6.2 had not re-produced correctly at the printers but it should show the number of complaints in 2016 as 10, 2017/18 as 12, 2018/19 as 6 and 2019/20 as 11. Overall, in comparison to the number of transactions and customer engagements at the Council for example there are over 4 million bin collections, the complaints figures were extremely good.

15.3          The Chair thanked the Head of Corporate Services for the report which he felt was good news but suggested that, as had been mentioned at the Chair’s briefing, a little less detail would be better going forward. He also referred to the fact that the report mentioned learning from complaints and changing policies or the way that things were done as a result of complaints, and he wondered whether there were any examples of lessons learned. In terms of lessons learned, for Members information, there was a recent audit report on the complaints framework specifically around lessons learnt and this resulted in a recommendation that there should be some independent assurance check to make sure lessons learned were actually applied. Accordingly, he would be getting someone in the Corporate Services team to liaise with services to check that the outcomes which stated what lessons had been learned had actually been applied. He also gave an example of lessons learned in relation to the waste service and particularly missed bins where, if bins were repeatedly missed, they went on a red list for a period of time that initiated additional checks being undertaken to make sure the bin was being collected. A Member suggested that it might be worth recording concerns as well as complaints - that way the number of complaints may reduce as they could be dealt with when raised as a concern. The Head of Corporate Services indicated that this was not something that had been considered but could be looked at as part of the review of the complaints framework and he asked the Member whether she had any experience of such an arrangement. In response the Member indicated that it was a practice undertaken in the NHS. It was agreed that this was something that could be investigated going forward.

15.4          It was

RESOLVED          That the annual complaints report for 2019/20 be NOTED.