2005 Citizen redress

2.Main Content

2005 Citizen redress

This page contains an outline of this research, and a summary of the key findings. Details of how to find the full report can be found at the bottom of the page.

Title
“Citizen Redress: What citizens can do if things go wrong with public services”

What is it?
Every year 1.4 million complaints about public services are made through various redress systems. These complaints are processed by over 9,300 staff at an annual cost of £510 million. This report maps existing redress systems for individual citizens challenging what they perceive to be poor treatment, mistakes or injustices by central government departments or agencies. It explores what processes exist for handling complaints and appeals, including internal review and complaints procedures, tribunals, adjudicators and the public-sector ombudsmen.

Who did it?
The report was commissioned by the National Audit Office and researched and produced by a team from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and University College London. The team conducted a census of government departments’ and agencies’ website to determine how accessible information is on redress systems. They also undertook a mystery shopper exercise involving 20 agencies, focus groups and a national opinion survey. The report was published in March 2005.

Key findings
The report explains that public-sector redress systems have developed in a piecemeal way and have been based on a distinction between "complaints" and "appeals".

Complaints have traditionally been considered to be part of the internal business arrangements of government departments and are thought of in terms of customer service. Unresolved complaints can usually be taken to an ombudsman or an independent complaints handler.
Appeals, part of appeals systems and tribunals, are part of the administrative justice sphere and are concerned with the accuracy or correctness of decisions made by public bodies. Some appeals systems are independent from the original decision-makers, but some are not.

The researchers conclude that this separation of complaints and appeals, unique to the public sector, means that government departments and agencies provide two different systems of redress, forcing citizens with grievances to cope with the complexities of two systems rather than an integrated approach to ‘getting things put right’.

Awareness

About half of government departments do not know how many complaints they received in the two years studied.
Survey responses show that the public considers the handling of complaints and appeals by government departments and agencies to be complex, difficult to access, hard to understand, slow-moving, expensive, time-consuming and not well placed to meet their needs or expectations. The departments were also considered to be formal, impersonal and intimidating.
One in six people did not expect a reply when they complained about a public service.
Only one person in fourteen mentioned any kind of ombudsman unprompted when asked how they might go about resolving a problem with a public service.
Mediators and other ADR redress processes seem to have a very low public profile.
Through mystery shopping it was discovered that many government departments were difficult to reach by phone, or slow to respond, and others were not set up to deal with such requests.

Statistics

In the year 2003-04 the highest number of complaints received by government departments were about health issues, including complaints about the NHS. Of 147,500 complaints, 280 were dealt with by a mediator, and 4,750 were handled by the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman.
The average cost of handling a complaint in central government was £155, but this average covers a wide range, from £2 to many thousands of pounds. The costs per complaint were particularly high in defence and immigration and low in industry and commerce.
Just under 755,000 appeals and/or tribunal cases were handled in 2003-04. The top categories were social security (one-third), taxation and finance (one-quarter) and immigration (one-fifth), from central government; from local authorities they were education and environment.
The average cost of appeals relating to central governments departments and agencies was £455, representing a range of less than £250 to more than £1,000.
Ombudsmen and independent complaints handlers in the public sector were found to add significantly to the scale of activity in citizen redress, with a workload of more than 39,000 new cases each year, more than 1,100 staff, and total costs of more than £42 million.
Early or informal resolution (sometimes referred to as mediation) is used by some independent complaints handling bodies and ombudsmen. The Adjudicator’s Office, for example, resolves about one-third of its cases by mediation.
No attempt was made to calculate an average cost per case for cases dealt with by the independent complaints handlers and ombudsmen because of the wide variation in the nature of cases and how they are handled by the different schemes.

Recommendations

The report makes a number of recommendations as to how government departments could improve their complaints handling. Among these are the recommendations that government organisations should:

review how they define a complaint
report on their redress procedures
take into account the individual needs of different social groups
not assume that citizens have access to the internet
collect information on complaints and appeals in a systematic way
use information on successful appeals to improve first-instance decision making

The authors also make a number of government-wide recommendations. They suggest that the DCA should look at developing more pro-active mediation and other ADR routes to redress, and propose that the government should consider whether there could be a single access point for citizens to get information on how to make a complaint or seek redress from a public service.