Examination of Witnesses (Questions 349-359)
PROFESSOR PATRICK
DUNLEAVY AND
MR PHILIP
CULLUM
22 MARCH 2007
Q340 David Heyes: I just want to
continue this question about the ombudsman briefly, and you used
the example of the Financial Ombudsman Service and it is really
on the basis of their methodology that you are impressed by them.
I have to say that in practice, when I have tried to use the Financial
Ombudsman Service—you are quite right that MPs often do
play a recognised role in this and it is a kind of advocacy role
on behalf of the complainant—but in the dealings I have
had personally with the Financial Ombudsman Service, we rarely
get satisfaction for the complainant. I would only take forward
what I considered to be a fair and worthy complaint which had
some merit in it, but I cannot ever remember succeeding in a complaint
to the Financial Ombudsman Service. I get the impression that
they are actually a creature of the banking system rather than
being there as a representative or an impartial broker which is
what we would want them to be, so can I just ask you to comment
on that.
Professor Dunleavy: I think that
the Financial Ombudsman Service finds in favour of the complainant
about 35% of the time, so you are absolutely correct, that they
do tend to stick with the banks or the financial industry in the
majority of their resolutions. But I think you need to bear in
mind that a lot of the very clear-cut cases are resolved in that
eight weeks before the formal case kicks off. So, if a bank has
done something and made a terrible mistake, got somebody's address
wrong or something, they will not want to persist with that, and
they tend to give a speedy resolution to those cases. Also, they
settle a lot of cases at the point where the Financial Ombudsman
Service thinks that this is a stood-up case and the banks and
the companies will settle very speedily usually at that point.
So there are a lot of cases where they find in favour of the banks
at the later stages, but that is because I think the easy ones
tend to be dropping out a little bit earlier. I am not saying
that the Financial Ombudsman Service is the be-all and end-all
in terms of the way it operates; but what I am saying is that
the methodologies used are very interesting methods and they are
giving more of a mediated service to people and more of a speedy
resolution of cases—whereas, if you look at the public sector,
there is this tendency to put things into buffer zones and queue
them up for a very long period of time before a decision is made.
Q341 David Heyes: It is perhaps unfair
to pick on the Financial Ombudsman Service because there are quite
a number of ombudspersons that have been created by these types
of organisations which very often give the appearance of being
on the side of the bodies that created them rather than on the
side of the consumer. Does the NCC have a view on this?
Mr Cullum: Yes, but we have not
done the research on the Financial Ombudsman Service in particular
in terms of the sort of experience you were talking about, but
at the general level you are absolutely right, that professional
bodies that assess complaints notoriously favour the industry
side, which is why gradually in areas like legal services there
has been a shift away from that, but I think the financial one
is structured differently, so I do not think it does fall into
the same category. From our side we would say, "Well, what
do consumers want out of any services?", and I guess what
we are talking about is an ecology of complaints-handling and
redress, how much is done internally and how much is external,
how much is independent of the organisation, how much is formal
and how much is informal, and people want a speedy resolution,
they do want their own case to be sorted out. I think our evidence
suggests that often, as well as their own case, people are concerned
more generally about being sure that this is not going to recur
for other people. Although the kind of test case strategy is fine,
but it really does then need to be applied to other situations,
so, rather than being sort of bought off in their own circumstances,
people want some kind of reassurance that in some way it is being
fed back into the organisation, so that even when it is external
and a more formal process, it still needs to play back into how
the organisation is led and how you get the messages across to
the front line about what they should be doing differently in
the future.
Q342 David Heyes: This type of criticism
could actually be levelled at the NCC, could it not, because you
are appointed by, and could be perceived as a creature of, government
anyway?
Mr Cullum: We have an independent
board who keep us on the straight and narrow. I am a member of
the professional staff and a lot of our work is driven by the
research which we do with consumers and I think we are very clear
about the difference between representing consumer interests and
talking about individual experiences because you do have to go
beyond anecdotes. In the last week I've been to three consumer
research events. One with Gordon Brown, Patricia Hewitt and Caroline
Flint on Friday, which was a pre-Budget thing which we ran, and
then two focus groups on Tuesday. So I think we are pretty closely
connected with the consumer experience, but, like everybody else,
we could always do more.
Q343 David Heyes: If I can put a
very awkward question to both of you, you sat through most of
the previous session we had where we were focusing on the Charter
Mark issue, so, if you want to talk to us about the Charter Mark,
your views on it and your criticisms of it, this is an opportunity
to do that.
Mr Cullum: I thought it was a
very interesting session and I agree with the view that one of
the issues for all sorts of organisations, because I do not think
it is just limited to public services, but including public services,
is how you provide some sort of mechanism and focus for people
to change and how you make them more focused on the interests
of consumers. Over the years that I have been doing consumer work,
my view has gradually changed. I used to think that the public
sector and the private sector were terribly different, but I am
not sure I do think that anymore, having done lots of work on
the private sector which seems to me just as unfocused on consumer
needs at times, if not more sometimes, so these kinds of mechanisms
do feel very important. Also, it feels that there very clearly
is an issue about awareness of it. Although we have not done surveys
on awareness, I would be surprised if you did a consumer survey
and vast numbers of public service users knew what the Charter
Mark was or how it was earned. Over time, my sense is that the
way in which they are awarded has become more sophisticated. One
of the issues you were talking about earlier was about customer
satisfaction surveys, and we have concerns about the bluntness
of satisfaction surveys at times, but it feels like it has become
more sophisticated. I remember a few years ago looking at the
Charter Mark announcement and there was a press release with the
announcement about each winner, and one of the things they were
all required to do was to demonstrate that they had surveys of
user opinion. I remember reading of all these fire brigades who
all said they had 98 or 99% customer satisfaction, but I was never
quite sure whether that meant that you had been carried from a
burning building by a burly fireman or that your house had not
burnt down this year, so it was another good year. So there are
big questions about how you delve beyond the headline figures,
who you survey and what you really ask them about.
Q344 David Heyes: Is there a role
for the Charter Mark? What might the future be?
Professor Dunleavy: I think the
Charter Mark was a moderately successful innovation in the early
1990s and I am sure it does some good in the world in the way
of a lot of things, but I do not think from any of our research
that we have ever encountered a view that it was salient from
the grassroots, and it is mentioned very rarely in focus groups
and so on. The other thing that slightly worries me about it is
that quite a large number of government agencies now—especially
small- and medium-sized agencies, agencies which perhaps do not
deal very extensively with the public or in conflictual situations,
where there is a conflict of interest between the citizen and
the agency—they really are in a position to get towards
what we call `zero complaints'. Now, you would have to define
what `zero complaints' meant, and it might not mean absolutely
zero, but for a large number of government agencies it is possible
to go from one year to the next with very, very few complaints,
so that you can also proactively respond to those complaints.
It seems a little bit invidious to me to give agencies of that
kind a Charter Mark, as if they have done something special, when
really it is not all that taxing for them to be in that situation.
If you look at it from the perspective of people in rather stressful
work conditions, dealing with difficult clients, trying to assemble
information perhaps with not very good IT systems and so on which
they are grappling with, to see other agencies getting the Charter
Mark when they are doing their best and not getting one, and not
within an observable distance of getting one, I think, is a little
bit counter-productive.
Q345 David Heyes: By inference then,
it has a significant impact on the organisation in the example
you just gave in terms of staff motivation?
Professor Dunleavy: Yes, I think
it can be demotivating for people to see other people getting
a Charter Mark when they have not got a comparably difficult task
to deal with.
Q346 Chairman: But the experience
of the passport service, which we have been hearing about, which
is very much a customer-facing organisation, their ability both
to lose the Charter Mark and to reacquire one surely shows that
it does work, and can work, very well in those kinds of settings?
Professor Dunleavy: Most central
government administrative agencies, if they were able to triple
their expenditure, could get a Charter Mark, I would think.
Mr Cullum: But you are right,
I think, to say that. The questioning which was going on earlier
on, asking about how easy is it to lose one is absolutely pertinent
to this. Clearly, for it to work properly, there has got to be
both a positivity about getting it plus a residual fear at the
back of your mind about losing it. I do not think we are maybe
quite as negative about it and we do think it is a good way of
trying to engage staff. The Passport Agency is a fantastic example
of an organisation, even though they have spent more money, which
was unbelievably lacking in focus on consumers and completely
disorganised and one which, although not perfect, is now clearly
better.
Q347 Chairman: I asked Bernard Herdan
whether he could explain or justify the way in which the whole
Citizen's Charter approach, of which the Charter Mark was a component,
had been effectively ditched. The Ombudsman has said to us in
the past that she thinks that this was a big mistake and it involved
taking the eye off the ball as far as users were concerned. Is
that a view which either of you would share?
Mr Cullum: Clearly the Citizen's
Charter was quite a well-known concept and where the previous
witness was describing its associations with the past, I can see
where that is coming from, but, as a branding issue, I do not
feel particularly strongly about it. I guess there is an issue,
which you also touched on, which is about the extent to which
consumers and users of services are very clear about what they
can expect from those services and, to that extent, elements of
the Citizen's Charter worked quite well and people had something
which they could look at and say, "I am supposed to be getting
this". Now, there are different mechanisms for doing that.
Do you need something which encompasses all services? How specific
do want to make it locally? How is it articulated?. But it is
that idea of having something. One tenant we interviewed in our
research recently said, "I just want them to run a professional
service. They should have a statement saying what we can expect
and stick to that". That seemed to me quite a reasonable
point of view.
Q348 Chairman: That was a core idea
of the Citizen's Charter originally, was it not?
Professor Dunleavy: I think the
most valuable bit of the Citizen's Charter was the idea of trying
to communicate in a well-worked-out way to citizens that there
were some general public service standards and what these standards
might be. I think that subsequently—with the sort of edging
out of the Charter; and the Office of Public Services Reform not
being very effective in the Cabinet Office; and then with other
things, like the abolition of community health councils in the
Health Service and a real hiatus in the patient support services
for several years—there has been a real drop-off in focus
on that for some time. There are other newer things that are coming
along, like Transformational Government[10],
which are beginning to have an impact, but I think there was a
dodgy period a few years back in this area.
Q349 Chairman: It is the angle of vision
that is different, is it not, in the sense that we went, it seemed
to me, from one which focused very much on the standards to be
expected of users of services and their entitlements to one which
gave obligations on service-deliverers and managers to meet targets?
You are coming at it from a different perspective, are you not?
Professor Dunleavy: Also, citizens
find it very hard to understand the terminology in different areas,
understand what they can expect and understand the time delays.
We found that people have a sort of "shotgun" idea of
how long it will take to resolve a complaint or an appeal: many
people think it is going to take a very long time in the public
sector, which is an offputting thing for them.
Q350 Mr Liddell-Grainger: It is getting
complicated to complain now compared to the good old days when
you knew you could go to your council. It is desperately complicated.
If you look at these websites on how to complain, even they are
complicated. What advice would you give to somebody who wants
to complain? Can we not make the system less complicated?
Mr Cullum: I think that is what
we are both arguing for and certainly on the formal side of things,
that is exactly what it should be.
Q351 Mr Liddell-Grainger: But how
do you do it? You are arguing for it, but how do you do it?
Mr Cullum: We have been focusing
a bit on the formal side, but personally I think a lot of the
issue is about how organisations are led and run and actually
the big issue is not so much some of the formal mechanisms, it
is the informal approaches within organisations and their systems.
I say again, from the work that we have done, this is something
which is an issue endemic to both public and private organisations.
Individuals do not particularly like being on the receiving end
of complaints. Nobody particularly wants to be told that they
have not done a good job and people are inevitably defensive about
that. So for the leadership of organisations, the challenge is
how you break down those barriers so that people do see that actually
they will not be necessarily blamed personally if there is a complaint
and that the organisation learns from it and you both put it right
and do something differently.
Professor Dunleavy: Some things
have got easier. If you are online, I think it is much easier
now with Google, the search engines and so on: they have made
it easier for people to access complaints. The proportion of department
and agency websites with easy access to make a complaint has gone
up from 70% to 82% in the last three years, and that is a positive
movement. I think MPs have been very much more activist over the
last ten years in their involvement in complaints. And some departments
have also moved towards more centralised handling of MPs' and
other people's complaints, certainly the Department of Health
has made that move and so on, so there have been some positive
things. However, particularly if you are not on the Internet and
you do not have a particular piece of paper in front of you with
a named official, you still have a really major problem in kicking
off a complaint.
Q352 Mr Liddell-Grainger: I suppose
the next question is: do we, God forbid, need to bring forward
some form of legislation to actually help, to try and say, "This
is your right to complain", though there is obviously a better
way of doing it, or should you two just get together and set up
onestopcomplaint.com? Where do we go from here? You have given
us the theory, but give us the practice.
Professor Dunleavy: I myself would
like to see a kind of regionalisation of the ombudsman service.
I would like to see the ombudsman service playing more of a role
in the bulk handling of complaints and being a little bit less,
"We are the elite. We handle the very interesting and difficult
complaints". So I think there would be more that you could
do in that way and particularly if there was a national as well
as regional phone numbers for people who do not have Internet
access, that is really the number one priority, I think.
Q353 Mr Liddell-Grainger: Well, let
us take a regional scenario where you have a national body. Does
the national body have a regional part or do you set the regional
part up to a national body? As MPs, we write up on complaints
and yes, you are absolutely right, I think we probably have become
more proactive, but the letters we get back are pretty unreadable
most of the time. Quite honestly, when you get them back, you
are not entirely sure what you should be telling the constituent.
Surely, there is a need to have some plain English amongst all
of this and either a responsibility or not a responsibility? Can
that not be cleared up?
Professor Dunleavy: I think most
of the problems, 75% of the problems arise in three areas: tax,
DWP, and the National Health Service. And we would suggest that,
unless you have very focused management attention on these big,
regular complaints-generating sources, you will not be able to
get a real improvement. I think you can look at some parts of
DWP, such as the Pension Service led by Alexis Cleveland, and
they have made very important reductions in complaints through
shifting towards more phone-based, more interactive systems. Here
they get more of the right kind of information out of people and
they make more of the right decisions, first time. So, instead
of the very broad-brush kind of things which do not really focus
on the places where the big bulk of complaints are being generated,
we would like to see an approach focused on those remaining big
complaint-generating areas.
Q354 Mr Liddell-Grainger: I do not
disagree with the three examples you gave, I think that is probably
pretty fair, but can we just take the train companies. If a train
company is, I think, over two hours late, you get something back,
although I cannot remember exactly what it is, I have taken up
complaints for constituents. Should that happen with government
bodies where there is a stick, a very public stick?
Professor Dunleavy: In our focus
groups, people were quite equivocal about compensation. They certainly
felt that, if somebody suffered as a result of a decision or a
bad process, they should be put back to where they were. But they
were worried about the possible growth of a kind of litigation-based,
damages-based culture, so it was not a high priority for them.
Q355 Mr Liddell-Grainger: It makes
the offending party actually have to do something. It is very
easy to hit button B and send out a gobbledegook letter, but it
is a pain in the neck if you have got to send out a cheque or
some other thing to keep them quiet, so you want to have some
form of punishment other than button B, do you not?
Professor Dunleavy: Certainly
the amounts of compensation paid out by central government bodies
are very, very small at the moment.
Q356 Mr Liddell-Grainger: That is
why I am asking you the question. Should we explore that?
Mr Cullum: I suppose from our
side it would be back to what people want out of it. They want
their own situation to be remedied, so, if they have suffered
a loss, it is only appropriate that that is covered, and they
want the system to change for other people. So then I guess it
is a judgment about whether applying some sort of penalty will
create an incentive for the organisation to improve. Part of the
issue then, I would imagine, is what the relationship is between
the staff members and the company and, for it to work, you would
have to create a culture in which the staff members cared as to
whether the organisation was going to be effectively fined or
not. I think our experience of the focus groups is the same as
Patrick's, but I think one issue is whether, at the moment, in
areas like transport, there is an incentive on the companies actually,
because of payment, not to tell you of your rights. So you say
that, if a train is particularly late or there is a delay on the
Tube, you can get a payment back; but, in my personal experience,
I have never heard that announced. If you are standing on the
Tube platform for more than 20 minutes, they do not make an announcement,
saying, "We've just triggered your rights under a particular
compensation scheme." The danger is that actually by creating
some of these structures, the imperative on the organisation is
then to bury the details, which I guess goes back to the question
not just about having rights, but how they are communicated and
articulated so that people really know what they can do.
Q357 Mr Liddell-Grainger: That brings
me back to the level where I started, that it is too complicated
to complain. Therefore, you have answered your own question actually
in many ways, that we have got to make it simpler, so is Philip's
and Patrick's onestopcomplaint.com on the cards?
Mr Cullum: I think we are both
saying that it does need to be simpler and we are both suggesting
that, at the very high level, the ombudsman scheme needs to become
much less fragmented. Just to put in a word for colleagues at
Consumer Direct, that is providing us at the NCC with a huge amount
of very useful information about areas of consumer detriment.
It does seem to be well received by people as a way of doing some
sort of routing. It is an interesting suggestion, what you say,
and the idea of somebody else stepping in to help do some of the
routing. I do lots of work on regulation and we have done quite
a lot of work on reputation and regulation, we published a pamphlet
at the end of last year about it, and one of the interesting areas
there is the extent to which in the utilities, for example, it
is not the regulator who tells you what the best deal for you
might be, but what they do is authorise and accredit uSwitch.com
or moneysupermarket.com and all these different people, so it
is saying that actually there is a valid role for somebody as
a sort of integrator coming from a non-government perspective,
and maybe that is an interesting issue to pursue further.
Q358 Mr Liddell-Grainger: It is very
easy for us, as MPs, because we tend to know, in the three examples
you gave, who to go to, we know who to get hold of, and there
are certain government organisations which have dedicated switchboards
for irate MPs, and maybe that is a good idea or not, but that
is not open to the public. You are right, you look on the Net,
but you do not know how to complain—and I do not know where
consumerdirect.com lives, I do not even know if it is British,
I assume it is, but I have no idea—and that is possibly
because you have nobody to guide you. Surely, between us and in
an ideal world, there must be a solution because this is what
we are trying to find out, but how do you come up with a solution?
Is it legislation, is it stricter guidelines, is it an overall
controlling body like oft.com or something, or maybe oftcomplain.com
is the one, or is it that we become, as citizens, more aware of
our rights through government propaganda, which I suppose is a
crude word, or awareness?
Mr Cullum: Lots of those things,
yes, that is a good checklist. I think one thing which you alluded
to is really important. At the moment we have been focusing on
putting things right and we would prefer as much as possible to
focus on organisations getting it right rather than just putting
it right. You talked about a more direct contact with organisations
and again, back to both our public and private sector research,
what seems to us to be an ongoing problem is that organisations
and the people at the top especially are completely distant from
any sort of customer experience. They are surrounded by people
who tell them that the service is absolutely brilliant, so they
are not challenged and they do not hear what it is like. I think
you talked in the first session about Tesco and people have mixed
views about Tesco, but the supermarkets have actually come out
quite well in our surveys. One of the things which I think makes
a difference in the way Tesco operate is that the Chief Executive
personally spends a lot of time with consumers and that makes
a difference. It sends a signal about the organisation and it
makes a difference to the culture.
Professor Dunleavy: In fact all
the board members have to do a week in store, and every year just
before Christmas and Easter all the headquarters staff have to
work in store. There is no substitute for people getting a good
grip on how it feels, and we are constantly amazed at that.
Q359 Mr Liddell-Grainger: But you
come to the chicken and egg, do you not, by putting it right and
getting it right and, to put it right, you have got to make the
push to be able to do that. At Tesco, that means you do not shop
there or whatever and they see that in their figures, but the
Identity and Passport Service is a prime example of where it was
so bad that everybody complained, so they had to improve it, but
that, for the average citizen, is very hard to do.
Professor Dunleavy: Yes.
Mr Cullum: Personally I would
not overplay that argument in relation to the private sector.
I wrote a report last year called the stupid company, the
subtitle of which was how British business throws money away
by alienating consumers.[11]
Companies often act totally against their own self-interest and
you would think intellectually that they would be completely driven
by the desire to win as much business as possible, but that is
not obviously true. For some, but not for everybody.
Professor Dunleavy: It is a very
mixed picture.
10 Cabinet Office, Transformational Government:
Enabled by Technology, Cm 6683, November 2005 Back
11
National Consumer Council, the stupid company: how British
businesses throw away money by alienating consumers, February
2006 Back
|
