Public watchdogs are lining up to criticise the government’s methods of handling complaints and appeals. Richard Hall listens to fears that an already inadequate part of the justice system is coming under ever-increasing pressure.

Consumers are empowered in so many ways these days. Want to evaluate a hotel in Vienna before booking? Go to Trip Advisor. Need to check the history of a used Hyundai before purchasing? Just send a text message. Yet in other areas, it’s a very different story.

According to two reports published recently, customers get a raw deal when challenging the service they receive from public bodies (see also news, p3).
The Administrative Justice and Tribunals Council (AJTC) tries to ensure that service users appealing against government decisions receive a good service. The AJTC is facing immolation on the government’s bonfire of the quangos, but last month its chairman Richard Thomas lit a firework of his own in the report Securing Fairness and Redress: Administrative Justice at Risk? The report finds that it is becoming harder for individuals to challenge government decisions.

More people than ever are taking decisions on matters such as Disability Living Allowance to tribunals. Hundreds of thousands of government decisions are overturned each year, as the appeal success rate runs to 40 per cent. However, according to the report, fees involved in going to tribunals, cutbacks in legal aid and advice services, and complex regulations are erecting new barriers to justice.

“Making it more difficult for people to pursue their case must be the wrong response to unprecedented levels of demand,” says the report. The AJTC recommends more stable regulations; the fostering of a ‘right first time’ culture in government decision-making; proper advice and representation for citizens seeking redress; a more coherent, UK-wide approach; and new models for quicker dispute resolution.

A report on a similar theme was published on October 25 by the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman, Ann Abraham. Her review of complaint handling by government departments and public bodies was extremely critical. “We found that complaint handling across government is inconsistent, haphazard and unaccountable, operating without any overarching design, overall standards or common performance framework,” Abraham tells CSW.

At the present time, says the ombudsman, “there is no way for the government to know how effectively it is responding to complaints from citizens; there are no standards that set out what citizens can expect when they complain to a government department; and, crucially, there are no systems for sharing learning from complaints – so there is no clear process for driving improvement as a result of feedback”.

Abraham calls for “strong leadership at the top, committed to developing a culture across the civil service that values complaints”, and says she expects the Cabinet Office to take the lead on developing flexible common standards across government

Asked for a comment, a Cabinet Office spokesperson tells CSW: “People need to feel that [service users] can get redress when there is a problem, which is why having a complaints process which works is crucial.” The spokesperson adds: “We want to ensure that everyone has access to the best public services, which is why we are looking at opening up more to the best possible providers.”

But if the current arrangements are not sufficient to handle complaints effectively when most services are delivered by public bodies, how could they cope with a more diverse field of external providers? This is a concern shared by the ombudsman: “As provision of public services [becomes] more decentralised, clear standards that users and providers can reference need to be established,” she says. “Given our concern about the absence of such a standard now, it follows that we have some anxiety about how service complaints will be dealt with in the future.”

However, Thomas sees the diversifying of providers as an opportunity to drive up standards, arguing that challenging service providers’ decisions need not “be any more difficult just because the provider is an outsourced organisation. Some say that the private sector generally, because it is subject to the forces of competition, tends to be a little more user-friendly.”

Thomas adds that the public sector has a long way to go in understanding the importance of complaints, and in learning from upheld appeals. “Twenty years ago the private sector was resisting complaints. Now it solicits them as an important means of intelligence,” he says. “It’s the cheapest form of market research.”

Public sector workers’ union the PCS is less taken with the idea that widening service provision will improve user experience: “The threat of increased privatisation of services will diminish public accountability,” says a PCS spokesman. “It is telling that the issue of tax credits generated the most complaints when the government is piloting a scheme to use private sector providers to answer phone calls from taxpayers.” However, a spokesperson for HMRC responds that effective complaints handling is a key priority for the Revenue, pointing out that HMRC successfully resolves 98 per cent of complaints by customers through its own internal processes.

With watchdogs, unions and government bodies all having their say, what about the voice of the consumer? Alison Hopkins, public services expert at the statutory body Consumer Focus, is clear that service users feel short-changed by the current complaints arrangements. “We’ve looked at 23 services and saw that satisfaction with complaints handling is low almost across the board,” she says. “The Cabinet Office should take a stronger lead in making sure all departments take customer service and complaints handling seriously.”

The ombudsman believes that the civil service tends to adopt a defensive response to complaints. “This is about a culture change, so clearly there needs to be strong leadership from the top to make this happen. We see a role in this for the senior civil service and for Civil Service Learning,” says Abraham. Thomas, however, is sceptical: “The mandarins are interested in policy issues, and far less interested in how decisions are made affecting ordinary citizens,” he says.

At a seminar organised by the ombudsman last month, Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude accepted that service providers must do more to learn from mistakes. Thomas welcomes the sentiments, but responds: “My fundamental question is: where are the people responsible, the programmes for making it happen?” Unless change is driven from the top, he argues, people’s perceptions of the government are bound to deteriorate. “We talk a great deal about the need to involve people more in public life,” he says. “But the reality is that most people’s contact with the public sector is when they have a particular issue affecting their family, and if they find it very difficult to get their point across; if the officials make mistakes or misinterpret the law; if it’s a real uphill task to challenge this before a tribunal, that doesn’t resonate well in terms of democratic engagement.”

Consumer Focus says that only around half of the people who feel they have cause for complaint actually submit one. That’s hardly surprising when, as the ombudsman says, the complaints system “can be frustrating, confusing and exhausting for the person who simply wants to have what’s gone wrong put right for them, so they can move on with their life”.

Ministers acknowledge the problem, but the lack of urgent action suggests that they expect complaint handling and redress to be improved by competition, as larger numbers of alternative providers deliver services. They are banking on the market to do the work.

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Written by Richard Hall, CSW