Issue - meetings

UPDATE ON CORPORATE COMPLAINTS AND STATUTORY COMPLAINTS FOR QUARTER 2

Meeting: 20/11/2018 - Adjudication & Review Committee (Item 8)

8 UPDATE ON CORPORATE COMPLAINTS AND STATUTORY COMPLAINTS FOR QUARTER 2 pdf icon PDF 197 KB

Additional documents:

Minutes:

The Committee considered a report which provided an update on complaint handling performance across all council services.

 

The Corporate Complaint Policy and Procedure was introduced on 1 April 2015. Turnarounds were set to 15 working days for Stage 1 complaints and 20 working days for Stage 2 complaints. Services should aim to respond to 95% of cases within time.

 

Some changes to the corporate timescales had been made, effective 1 October 2018, and the impact would be explored in greater detail at the next meeting of Committee.

 

The 2nd quarter performance statistics for all complaints under the procedure was appended to the report as Appendix 1.

 

In summary, the Council received 480 Stage 1 complaints during the period July to September 2018. 80% of them (383) were responded to within 15 days.

 

The council received 98 requests for escalation to Stage 2 of the process, 84% (82) of them dealt with within 20 days.

 

This equated to an escalation request rate of 20% however, this was reduced to 4% when considering the number of cases that were not escalated to Stage 2.

 

Results for Quarter 2 were disappointing, bearing in mind the target was 95%. However, this had been discussed at length at previous meetings and as a result; a review had been carried out into the effectiveness of the timescales set out in the Corporate Complaint Policy. A number of changes were made and this would be reflected in the Quarter 3 reporting period.

 

Quarters 1 and 2 statutory complaints statistics for Children’s Social Care and Adult Social Care were shown at Appendix 2 of the report.

 

There had been a slight increase in Children’s statutory complaints in Q1 (35) and Q2 (23) overall of 2% in 2018-2019 (58) compared to the same period in 2017-18 (57). Adult statutory complaints had seen a slight decrease in 2018-19 for Q1 (20) and Q2 (20) overall of 7% (40) compared to 2017-18 (43) in the same period.

 

Performance on response times for statutory complaints still required improvement with Adults having 65% (13 of 20) responded to within timescale in Q1 and 55% (11 of 20) in Q2 and Children’s having 34% (12 of 35) in Q1 and 61% (14 of 23) in Q2. There was one escalation to Stage 2 in Q1 and 4 in Q2 for Children’s Services within the statutory process.

 

Members noted that there was no Stage 2 process in Adult Social Care complaints. Following Stage 1 complaint the complaint automatically went to the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman.

 

Members were advised that there was a new system in place to deal with Housing complaints and that staff were confident of clearing the backlog of work by December 2018.

 

During Quarter 2 there were 19 decisions by the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman and the Housing Ombudsman.

 

The Committee noted the contents of the report and its appendices.