Memorandum from Professor Patrick Dunleavy
1. LSE Public Policy Group and Professor
Helen Margetts (now of Oxford University) undertook the research
for, and wrote, the March 2005 National Audit Office (NAO) report
on Citizen Redress: What citizens can do if things go wrong
with public services (HC 24, Session 2004-05). The concept
of citizen redress covers all the ways in which people may try
to rectify what they regard as mistakes made by government agencies
or public services, especially:
— appeals against decisions; and
— cases handled by ombudsmen (or some
mediators).
2. We are grateful to the Public Administration
Select Committee for the opportunity to give evidence on current
redress issues. For this briefing LSE Public Policy Group has
looked at recent changes in the field of citizen redress. The
comments below reflect entirely the views and opinions of LSE
Public Policy Group, derived from our recent research and the
public literature. They do not in any way represent the views
of the NAO.
OVERVIEW OF
THE CURRENT
SCALE AND
COSTS OF
REDRESS
3. During the year 2003-04 the Citizens
Redress report (p 44) estimated that within central government
alone there were:
— 1.4 million new redress cases annually,
split 803,000 for appeals, 543,000 for complaints and 42,000 for
ombudsmen and mediators;
— over 9,300 staff working in the redress
area, split 6,200 for appeals, 2,200 for complaints and 990 for
ombudsmen and mediators;
— at a total cost of £510 million,
split £366 million for appeals, £59 million for complaints
and £73 million for ombudsmen and mediators (some of whom
appear very expensive on a crude cost per case basis).
In addition there were estimated costs of nearly
£200 million, incurred by the Legal Services Commission in
providing legal aid to appeals or complaints applicants against
central government. This produces total redress costs in 2003-04
of at least £710 million annually for central government.
4. The fact that these data had to be especially
assembled, and contained many omissions because departments and
agencies could not supply data on the incidence and costs of redress
issues, is disturbing. Recent responses to a series of parliamentary
questions asked between February and March 2007 by Mr David Laws
MP suggests that major citizen-facing government departments still
do not collect data centrally on the number of complaints received
by organizations under their responsibility. Issues on which departments
have no data are almost invariably issues that are not being actively
managed.
5. The Citizen Redress report did
not cover the following large areas of complaints and appeals
activities:
— the National Health Service (outside
the national level agencies);
— the armed forces (outside the Ministry
of Defence);
— sub-national police complaints and
appeals;
— legal aid costs attaching to these
areas.
We cannot hazard a guess as to what these costs
may be, but they are certain to be very substantial.
6. How have costs moved in the interim?
They are certain to have increased quite appreciably, because:
— conventional redress processes are
very labour intensive, and hence their relative costs tend to
climb over time (following the well-known "relative price
effect" in economics);
— there are scant reasons for believing
that labour productivity in the redress area will have markedly
improved, despite recent e-government advances elsewhere;
— we have undertaken some probes to
track volumes of complaints and appeals, and while some areas
show signs of reduced volumes, others show increases we conclude
that overall volumes of people seeking redress are unlikely to
have fallen.
7. To get some indication of the possible
scale of costs increases, the Citizen Redress report showed
that appeals-handling bodies incurred about two thirds of the
overall costs arising from appeals at £245 million—the
remaining third being incurred by the departments or agencies
being appealed against. Subsequently most major appeals-handling
bodies were reorganized into the Tribunals Service and although
it is not possible to easily get a comprehensive picture of its
costs, its recent (2006) Business Plan put running costs at £285
million per year—an increase of at least 16%. Some of this
may be due to higher costs caused by reorganization, but some
offsetting economies of scale and scope may also have been achieved
8. Overall then, we estimate that total
citizen redress costs (for UK central government alone) are now
more than £830 million a year.
WHAT CITIZENS
WANT FROM
REDRESS SERVICES
9. For the NAO report we carried out extensive
focus group work with citizens and customers of government agencies,
and a very clear picture of what they were looking for from redress
processes emerged.
(i) Citizens' first priority is to have clearly
understandable redress processes that can be simply found and
activated. Many people who have problems with a service want to
discuss with someone whether they have grounds for a complaint
or appeal. People without internet access (still around 40% of
households) find it very frustrating that they have to scavenge
around to discover who to contact or what to do to find out more.
The lack of a central information point on the internet and as
a phone number is a considerable problem. Citizens are deeply
confused by the official distinction between a complaint and an
appeal, which has little meaning for them, and by the separation
of information into distinct leaflets and parts of websites, instead
of these being handled as a group of linked activities.
(ii) Citizens' second priority is a speedy
recognition of where things have gone wrong (for whatever reason),
a rectification of mistakes and an apology where it is appropriate.
(iii) Third, many citizens want an assurance
that other people will not encounter the same problem as they
have, that systems have been changed to avoid similar mistakes,
and that lessons have been learned by the organization concerned
for the future.
(iv) Finally, most citizens support some
modest compensation for people who have suffered a demonstrable
loss, sufficient to put them back to where they would have been
had correct decisions been made or appropriate processes been
used initially. (Citizens do not generally believe that large
amounts of compensation should be paid from public funds, for
fear that it would encourage excessive claiming behaviours and
detract from current service levels.)
WHAT CITIZENS
CURRENTLY GET
FROM REDRESS
SERVICES
10. Despite the very substantial costs incurred
by government in providing redress, and despite the UK's general
reputation as a modern and generally responsive public administration
system, LSE Public Policy Group believes that citizens are generally
receiving a poor level of service in the following ways:
A. Complaints and appeals systems are separated
in most government departments and many agencies and they are
not assigned very high levels of priority in terms of the development
of expertise and professionalism. They are often service backwaters
with poorly qualified staff and managers, located on the periphery
of organizations and not attracting much top management attention.
B. Current redress systems provide a poor
standard of service in terms of creating long delays before citizens
get responses—up to six months on council tax banding appeals,
for instance. When complaints or appeals are triggered most organizations
still create buffer zones into which files enter until a response
or an appeal date is imminent. So citizens do not get a timely
responses and instead feel that departments are trying to exhaust
their patience or bore them into dropping complaints or appeals
through inaction.
C. Current redress procedures encourage counter-productive
practices—for instance, there are almost no attempts at
speedy or independent mediation. Some complaints managers will
proactively seek to resolve their cases, but others will not.
Almost all appeal cases go straight to queues for hearings, with
only brief checks by departments on whether a mistake has been
made. Government organizations and complainants or appellants
often then spend a great deal of time in acquiring mountains of
non-relevant evidence just in case it comes in useful at later
stages, instead of there being a sharp, focused and timely attention
to what is the central point at issue.
D. There is poor organizational learning
from mistakes by some major government departments and agencies.
Many smaller and medium government organizations have actually
been able to approximate a "zero complaints" regime,
and officials in these organizations will move swiftly to take
corrective action if this picture is disturbed. But other big
generators of complaints and appeals show the same patterns of
chronic malfunctions, with little improvement or even focused
management attention over time.
E. The overall redress system in England
especially is highly siloed and specific. Complaints and appeals
are handled separately. The rules covering complaints and appeals
vary sharply from one policy area to another, and even the nomenclature
used by government bodies (for instance, how they define and count
complaints) is not standardized. Citizens usually have to begin
again from scratch in learning how to complain or appeal, or even
who to talk to about complaining or appealing, in every policy
area. The Tribunals Service has begun moving on a path towards
greater commonality in the rules of appeals-handling, but this
will be a long process, not least because the costs and workloads
of its different component tribunals vary greatly.
F. There is no integrated system of ombudsman
services in England, such as is found in Scotland. Most really
serious problems—such as abuse of children or neglect of
an elderly person's medical and social care—will be inherently
multi-agency problems. Equally the proportion of decisions being
made in partnership working and joined-up-governance arrangements
has grown very sharply in recent years. But the ombudsman process
will still handle any of these aspects in fragmented and non-joined-up
ways. The Office of the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman
OPHSO) also does not fulfil the role of being a clear and well-known
focus for citizen complaints that is carried out by (for instance)
the Netherland National Ombudsman.
WHAT COULD
BE DONE
TO IMPROVE
CITIZEN REDRESS
11. There are a great many useful suggestions
of an incremental kind in the recommendations of the NAO's Citizen
Redress report and there have been some encouraging signs
of progress on some of them. For instance, between 2004 and 2006
the proportion of government websites where people can find out
how to complain went up from 70% to 82%. And since the launch
of an improved website, the Office of the Parliamentary and Health
Service Ombudsman has begun to play a somewhat more prominent
role as a first-port-of-call for citizens wishing to complain—for
example by encouraging enquiries through an online form allowing
citizens to sound out their grievances with government and get
advice on how to proceed.
12. However, LSE Public Policy Group believes
that the redress services available for citizens are still poor,
despite their substantial annual costs. We would encourage the
Public Administration Select Committee to look at the possibilities
of more radical reforms that might hold out a prospect of moving
towards a much more radically improving picture. These might include:
A. Encouraging the government to commit to
achieving and maintaining a "zero complaints" regime
over large policy areas, a goal already feasible in many agencies,
and to phasing down complaints and appeals in the remaining other
areas over a realistic timescale.
B. Encouraging the government to develop
professionalism and expertise within the citizen redress area.
For example, could departments and agencies with chronic and recognized
complaints/appeals problems be asked to appoint Chief Redress
Officers (analogous to the role of Chief Information Officers
in IT), whose job would be to try to get closer to the zero complaints
regime that many of the best medium sized agencies now operate?
All departments and agencies with large-scale or recurring caseloads
of complaints or appeals should also be asked to co-locate their
complaints and appeals functions and to link them closely with
units looking at customer satisfaction.
C. Could citizen redress functions in high
case load areas be developed as a shared service, where a small
number of professionally-run and specialized units would proactively
seek to deliver timely responses and to reduce the stacking up
of complaints and appeals, each unit handling a larger number
of client departments and agencies? By concentrating the management
of complaints and appeals into fewer and more expert bodies within
the civil service (or outsourced providers), with a clear mission
to provide improved redress services, it might be possible to
reduce the chronic sources of caseloads and to help organizations
to better learn lessons that will cut the incidence of mistakes
or wrong decisions for the future. Stronger and more pro-active
phone-based and internet-based methods of working could be introduced
at the same time.
D. Instead of the current legalistic and
detached appeals-handling processes that characterize government,
there might be positive returns in moving towards the kind of
solution offered by the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) in the
financial services sector. Here the FOS delivers effective first
stage mediation for around 35% of cases and recharges the costs
of continuing actions to companies, creating a strong incentive
for them to settle cases speedily. Compared with current appeals-handling
in government, this is an effective service, but it is relatively
cheap and has high productivity.
E. Whatever happens on the point above, we
can see no rationale for continuing with current siloed ombudsman
arrangements for England. We would like to see a movement towards
ombudsmen based in each government region, handling all the cases
across central government, the NHS and local authorities that
arise within their region. The regional ombudsmen would be able
to get to know their patch in detail, to serve as very visible
routes into complaining and appealing for the public, and to deal
directly with government organizations on a recurring basis, so
as to improve lesson-drawing and to spread good practice in more
effective ways. They would be closer to customers and able to
offer a joined-up service to complainants (ideally covering also
the police service etc). There should be competition amongst regional
ombudsmen to best improve the services in their patch. The regional
offices would be supported by a small national ombudsman's office
that would run a national call centre to publicise complaints
and appeals routes and would provide specialist back-up and legal
advice to regional colleagues. The national ombudsman's own workload
would be small, focusing chiefly on major test cases, those with
implications spanning across many complainants or many departments.
February 2007
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