Memorandum by Mr Gary Powell, LGOWatch
(LGO 08)
1 INTRODUCTION
1.1 I am a teacher of German and Philosophy
at a school in South London. In 2003 I founded a campaign called
Local Government Ombudsman Watch (LGOWatch) in response to grave
concerns I developed with regard to the claimed impartiality of
the English Local Government Ombudsman, following my dealings
with this institution on behalf of a family that had experienced
problems with the Housing Department of their local authority.
1.2 This is a personal submission based
on my experience as Co-ordinator of LGOWatch, the only UK community
group representing citizens who have been treated unjustly by
the Local Government Ombudsmen.
1.3 At the outset, I should like to express
my conviction that a number of complaints against local government
that are submitted to the LGO will genuinely be trivial, vexatious,
malicious or simply misguided, and these complaints must of course
be rejected. Working as an officer in local government can be
a highly stressful experience, with the possibility of unreasonable
demands made both by some senior colleagues and by some members
of the public. The compassionate and professional approach adopted
by the many conscientious local government employees has an invaluable
outcome in the community.
1.4 However, there will be times when things
go wrong, and indeed seriously wrong. In these circumstances,
citizens have a right to expect a fair and even-handed consideration
of their complaint from the LGO. The evidence accumulated by supporters
of LGOWatch, represented both by statistics in the LGO's own published
documentation, and in the experience of the individuals who have
contacted us, indicates that the Commission for Local Administration
in England is institutionally biased against complainants, and
very reluctant indeed to find or report local government maladministration.
1.5 The main challenge for LGOWatch has
been, and remains, publicity. In order to pool evidence and provide
support for people who have suffered injustice in their dealings
with the LGO, we first needed to let other complainants know we
existed. Consequently, a website (www.ombudsmanwatch.org) was
set up with a contact e-mail address. In January 2004 I set up
a Google advertisement for LGOWatch that links to our website,
and that appears whenever "Local Government Ombudsman"
is entered into the Google search engine. The vast majority of
complainants to the LGO nevertheless remain unaware of our existence.
1.6 I have as a result of the advertisement
received many e-mails from people who have suffered real anguish
because the LGO has sided unfairly with the council despite compelling
evidence and the simple dictates of reason.
1.7 Some people have lost tens of thousands
of pounds, or even their life savings, as a result of unrecognised
maladministration, or had maladministration recognised but no
award of compensation; others have been caused stress and clinical
depression by their experience of institutional injustice, and
have even shared with me that they contemplated suicide.
1.8 My experience of running this organisation,
and as an individual who has dealt with the LGO, has taught me
that for some people—perhaps for many people—the bias
of the LGO does not have a trivial effect on their lives: depending
on the issue and the stakes involved, it can be the cause of intense
and protracted anguish and despair. The suffering is made all
the more trenchant when an experience of injustice from one institution
is then compounded by a further experience of injustice from a
second institution, where that second institution is dignified
by the State as a government body, and incorrectly publicises
itself as an impartial arbitrator. An unfair judgement by the
LGO that a council has not acted improperly will also compound
the complainant's experience of injustice by providing the body
complained about with an official endorsement of its behaviour
that it can then use as a means of closing any further discussion
of the injustice in question.
1.9 In 2004-05, the Annual Grant from Government
to the CLAE was £11,058,000, and it is a particularly painful
thought that the taxpayer is funding an organisation that is generally
working against the interests of the citizen, contrary to its
remit. It is a lamentable situation for citizens to be funding
an organisation that serves deliberately to undermine legitimate
complaints against local government.
1.10 Many of the individuals who have clearly
experienced injustice from the LGO and have reported their situation
to LGOWatch are highly articulate, professional people with a
university education. As so many of these people get nowhere with
their complaint, I have a particular feeling of dismay with regard
to the hopeless plight of people who experience maladministration
from a council that profoundly harms their basic quality of life,
and yet, struggling to some degree with literacy, are themselves
in no position to put up a struggle against the disingenuous reasons
that are used by the LGO to dismiss their cases. I can see no
alternative but for such people simply to give up and resign themselves
to their miserable circumstances. Citizens who are likely to experience
the worst suffering from their experience of maladministration
with injustice are probably those on a low income who are at the
council's mercy with regard to their basic conditions of existence
(particularly housing), or people suffering from stress and depression,
who are in no position to marshal further evidence and formulate
compelling arguments and counterarguments when the LGO's Investigators
disregard important details and act as though they are not bound
by their own published definitions of maladministration.
1.11 It is a recipe for disillusionment
with and cynicism towards political and government institutions,
when local government is not held accountable to a truly fair
and impartial arbitrator, and when the arbitrator that exists
is not held accountable by politicians to the public. The kind
of statistical and semantic spin-doctoring the Commission for
Local Administration in England uses in order to lend itself a
thin veneer of authenticity and integrity falls far short of the
standards our citizens have a right to expect from those appointed
ostensibly to safeguard the rights of the good citizen from institutional
injustice. This disillusionment erodes the very foundations on
which our social values and shared identity as a community are
built.
2 THE EVIDENCE
2.1 The LGO's own MORI Customer Satisfaction
Poll in 1999 revealed a 73% complainant dissatisfaction level
with his service; indeed, 61% of complainants described themselves
as "very dissatisfied" with the final outcome of their
complaint. There was even a high degree of discontent among those
whose complaints had been upheld, with half of them reporting
dissatisfaction with the outcome. These results are published
rather unconspicuously on the LGO's website, and are described
as being broadly similar to the 1995 MORI poll's results. LGOWatch
was disappointed to discover that no further Customer Satisfaction
Poll was published in 2003; it has been replaced by a Public Awareness
Survey. This is a particularly unsatisfactory development in my
view, given the very high customer dissatisfaction level the previous
polls had exposed, which might have been a cause of concern to
an institution genuinely committed to good practice, and where
a further similar poll would measure any degree of improvement.
2.2 It is admittedly the case that any complainants
who rightly or wrongly feel they have a cast-iron case are going
to be disappointed if the LGO's judgement goes against them, and
a proportion of the dissatisfaction statistics will no doubt be
represented by complainants with a weak case. However, it must
be borne in mind that the LGO will only investigate cases where
there is prima facie evidence of maladministration with injustice,
and this must represent a significant initial filter, and hence
a dissatisfaction level of this order, including among those whose
complaints have been upheld by the LGO, must be a cause for concern.
2.3 On reading the 1999 MORI report, I was
concerned to learn that the LGO even removed 11% of the sample
interviewed by MORI, this excised sample to include amongst others
"complainants who might have been emotionally unsettled or
abusive if contacted". I tried to find out from MORI what
proportion of this figure was represented by the potentially unsettled
or abusive complainants, but they had no breakdown by category
available. As the interviews were conducted by telephone, with
the interviewers therefore remote from any physical danger, I
found this information to be quite disturbing. I wondered who
decided on the definition of being "emotionally unsettled",
and on whose authority this judgement about an individual's psychology
was made. I wondered whether it included being angry at experiencing
blatant institutional injustice. I therefore suspect that the
dissatisfaction rates are even higher than those reported.
2.4 Inspection of the LGO's own published
statistics provides further evidence of bias with regard to the
underreporting of maladministration, where the majority of cases
are reported under a euphemism, made possible by a technicality:
the LGO closing down complaints either where he has found fault
in the local government institution and they have complied with
his remedy, or where the investigated body has offered voluntarily
to put things right during the investigation, regardless of the
harm the complainant has already experienced in the process of
suffering the maladministration and exhausting the body's complaints
procedure without success before referring the case to the LGO.
If the LGO agrees to investigate a case, it implies prima facie
evidence of maladministration with injustice, and if he upholds
the complaint and requests a remedy, then this in turn implies
the prima facie evidence of maladministration with injustice has
been borne out. However, if the council agrees to pay the (generally
paltry) sum the he suggests in compensation, then the LGO officially
terminates the investigation and only reports it as a "local
settlement". He can then hold the threat over the council
concerned that he will publish a report on the case as maladministration
if it does not agree to the remedy, where the case will in fact
be reported as maladministration in the statistics. This is an
entirely inappropriate policy, as maladministration surely does
not suddenly become non-maladministration just because the offending
body agrees to settle. This policy leads to a very significant
underreporting of the maladministration committed by local councils,
depriving the media and the public of important information about
their local government, and depriving councils of the incentive
to avoid maladministration. In the LGO's Annual Report for 2003-04,
for every case of maladministration reported, there were another
nineteen cases of maladministration hidden in the `local settlement'
statistics. (Of the 11,600 complaints submitted that he said he
could investigate in 2003-04, the Local Government Ombudsmen in
England reported that only 180 cases (1.6%) represented maladministration
by local government. There were however a further 3,368 cases
(29%) of maladministration that he reported merely as "local
settlement".)
2.5 The senior staff at the CLAE are far
too emotionally and professionally connected with the institutions
they are meant to be investigating impartially. I have discovered
that two of the three current English Local Government Ombudsmen
previously served as Local Authority Chief Executive Officers,
and indeed all three current Deputy Ombudsmen, and the current
Deputy Chief Executive, worked for a local authority before joining
the Commission. It does not inspire a great deal of confidence
in impartiality where an individual's own history will encourage
an automatic identification and sympathy with those who are currently
fulfilling a role he once had himself, given that his own council
would have been the subject of Ombudsman's investigations in his
previous employment. The recently-founded Independent Police Complaints
Commission has a very different flavour: when I conducted my research
in July 2004, not a single one of its chairperson, deputy chairperson
or fifteen Commissioners was formerly a police officer.
2.6 Attempts to establish how many LGO Investigators
previously worked in local government have been unfruitful. For
the sake of transparency, the CLAE should be prepared to divulge
this information, which could presumably be obtained by such a
simple measure as the LGO e-mailing his staff and asking them
where they used to work.
2.7 A correspondent who wrote to LGOWatch
informed me that she had discovered from the ODPM that on the
appointment of the last LGO, a member of the three-person selection
panel represented the Local Government Association. She was told
that the other two members of the Panel had a substantial knowledge
of local government. I do not think that many of those who take
complaints to the LGO are aware of the influence exercised by
local government on choosing who exactly is going to monitor them.
Once appointed, the LGOs do not seem to be on contracts of fixed
length, and this seems to conflict with guidance from the Office
of the Commissioner for Public Appointments; and although the
Commissioner reports on, regulates and monitors appointments to
approximately 10,000 public bodies, the LGO falls outside her
remit.
2.8 Ironically, I should imagine that there
are few government institutions in the country that commit maladministration
with injustice with the same degree of frequency and impunity
as the CLAE. The absence of any satisfactory mechanism for challenging
unjust judgements by the LGO serves to encourage and perpetuate
the CLAE's bad practice. The measure of judicial review seems
to be an avenue that is only open to the wealthy, and even then
it is very rare indeed to bring a successful challenge against
the Ombudsman via this route.
2.9 Where the LGO does find against a council
and requests a "local settlement", the sums involved
are generally quite paltry and frequently incommensurate with
the suffering experienced by the complainant.
3 RECOMMENDATIONS
3.1 As the Co-ordinator of LGOWatch I have
first-hand experience of the misery that is being brought about
by a Commission for Local Administration in England that is anything
but impartial. This injustice is being caused by the paradigms
of the CLAE's senior staff, who are too closely connected with
the people and institutions they are investigating, and too profoundly
associated with the thousands of cases of injustice inflicted
upon citizens who have turned to them for help. It is therefore
my view that:
(i) the CLAE must be abolished, and
replaced by a truly Independent Local Government Complaints Commission;
(ii) none of the new Commissioners
or senior staff appointed should have previously worked in local
government;
(iii) there should be an independent
appeals board to consider complaints against the findings of this
new Commission;
(iv) the new Commission should have
the power to fine local government institutions heavily for maladministration,
and to make substantial financial awards to complainants who have
suffered serious injustice as a result of bad practice;
(v) judgements of the new Commission
should be made legally binding;
(vi) every case of maladministration
should be reported as maladministration, and not as a "local
settlement". There should also be a grading of levels of
maladministration according to gravity, so that the most serious
cases are easily identifiable in published statistics;
(vii) a customer satisfaction survey
should continue to be carried out every four years in order to
encourage good practice within the institution, and statistics
relating to customer dissatisfaction published in a prominent
position in the new Commission's Annual Reports and Summaries;
(viii) Commissioners should be appointed
on fixed-term contracts;
(ix) the new Commission should be
brought within the remit of the Office of the Commissioner for
Public Appointments.
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