How and why the Local Government Ombudsman (Twitter: @LGOmbudsman) stitches up complainants.
When I was Director of Local Government Ombudsman Watch, I found out that the LGO had commissioned a MORI Customer Satisfaction Poll in 1999 that exposed a 73% complainant dissatisfaction level with the Local Government Ombudsman's service. 61% of complainants declared themselves to be ‘very dissatisfied’ with the final outcome of their complaint. The survey revealed that even among those whose complaints had been successfully upheld by the LGO, roughly 50% reported dissatisfaction with the outcome. The results of this poll are similar to the previous and subsequent ones.
A number of the complainants interviewed for these polls would admittedly have lacked a valid or significant complaint, and would have expressed unjustified dissatisfaction. However, one should remember that the complainants interviewed would have already passed through an initial filter, as the LGO only investigates cases where there is prima facie evidence of maladministration with injustice. A dissatisfaction level of this order, including high levels of dissatisfaction among those whose complaints had been upheld, should therefore surely be a serious cause for concern.
The dissatisfaction statistics are even worse than the MORI poll revealed, as prior to the poll, the LGO took it upon themselves to remove 11% of the random sample selected by MORI for interview, with the excuse that the 11% of complainants removed included people who "might have been emotionally unsettled or abusive if contacted". The LGO was permitted to exclude this 11% at its own complete discretion. When I tried to find out from MORI what proportion of this figure was represented by what the LGO claimed to be potentially "unsettled or abusive" complainants, I was told MORI had no breakdown by category available. As the interviews were conducted by telephone, with the interviewers therefore safe from personal danger, I was very concerned indeed to hear that such a potentially large sample was removed at the LGO’s compete discretion, and in my view without justification. I believe therefore that the potentially "emotionally unsettled and abusive" complainants were mostly people who were understandably very angry at how unjustly they had been treated by the LGO, or else simply people the LGO knew had been stitched up, and that the motivation for their removal from the interview sample was a damage limitation exercise on the part of the LGO.
Following the 1999 Customer Satisfaction Survey, there have been two further quantitative-type customer satisfaction surveys, and each time the LGO has removed more and more complainants from the sample selected for interview. For the survey following the 1999 one, the LGO removed 14% of the sample. For the subsequent survey, the LGO removed 18% of the sample. There is overwhelming evidence of significant and increasing statistical manipulation, and it is very disheartening that the Communities and Local Government Select Committee (Twitter: @CommonsCLG) has allowed the LGO continue behaving in this way with impunity.
The LGO’s own published statistics prove an under-reporting of maladministration. The majority of cases of maladministration are reported as ‘local settlements’. This is a euphemism. Where the LGO finds that a council is guilty of bad practice, and the council agrees to comply with his remedy, or volunteers to put things right during the investigation, regardless of the harm the complainant has been caused or the seriousness of the maladministration in question, the LGO officially terminates the investigation, and reports the maladministration as a ‘local settlement’. It is hardly a settlement in the usual sense of the word at all, because the complainant is unable to reject a settlement imposed by the LGO if the council agrees to it. On the other hand, the council has no legal obligation to accept any settlement suggested to them by the LGO. The local settlements are beyond any question still cases of maladministration, as the former ombudsman, Mr White, attested in his oral evidence during the 2005 evidence session. They are just not reported as such by the LGO when a council agrees to its "remedy". This results in under-reporting of local authority maladministration on a grand scale. The LGO generally only applies the term ‘maladministration’ if a council refuses to comply with the local settlement requested. When this happens, the LGO publishes a report. This is the punishment for a member not playing by the rules of the Old Boys' Club and jeopardising the whole edifice of privilege and subterfuge in the process.
Maladministration cannot become ‘non-maladministration’ just because a council agrees to comply with a remedy. The LGO logically cannot request that the council agree to a ‘local settlement’ unless he has determined that maladministration has taken place. Indeed, as noted above, Mr White admitted that ‘local settlements’ were cases of maladministration.
This misreporting of the true levels of maladministration results in the public receiving heavily massaged figures regarding the actual frequency of maladministration committed by their local authorities. This in turn encourages councils to commit maladministration with impunity, as they know it is very unlikely it will ever be reported as such in the media, and they also know that the LGO does all it can to keep its friends running local authorities off the hook.
As an example, in the LGO’s report for 2003/4, for every one case of maladministration reported (i.e. normally, where the council has refused to accept the LGO’s ‘local settlement’ proposal), there were a further nineteen cases of maladministration hidden in the ‘local settlements’ statistics. (Of the 11,600 complaints submitted that the LGO regarded prima facie as representing ‘maladministration with injustice’ in 2003/4, the LGO reported that only 180 cases (1.6 %) represented maladministration. There were however a further 3,368 cases (29%) of maladministration reported merely as 'local settlements'. The former Ombudsman, Jerry White, confirmed at the 2005 Select Committee evidence session that these further cases also represented maladministration.)
The investigating and adjudicating staff at the LGO, including the senior staff, are mostly recruited from local government. They are far too emotionally and professionally connected with local councils to be investigating them impartially. The Ombudsmen themselves, at the time when I ran LGO Watch, were usually former Chief Executive Officers of local authorities. In that former role, they would obviously have experienced findings of maladministration against their own councils - even if they were only described as ‘local settlements’ - and it is hard to believe they did not have an inappropriate degree of sympathy and identification with the CEOs of councils the LGO was investigating.
The LGO has been allowed by the select committee overseeing them - now called the Communities and Local Government Committee - to behave with impunity, and that has reinforced bad practice and led to a great deal of injustice being committed against UK citizens, some of whom are in a desperate situation, and have been seriously wronged, by the time they make a complaint to the local government ombudsman. There is no adequate mechanism for appealing against a finding of the LGO. Judicial reviews are only available to the wealthy. Even then, only very rarely is it possible to bring a successful challenge against the LGO via this route. There seems to be a great deal of resistance in the senior judiciary to challenging the judgment of the LGO. Even if a judicial review was upheld, the judges only have the authority to ask the LGO to take another look at his decision. For anyone pursuing this futile process, the legal costs costs can be astronomical.
Where the LGO requests a ‘local settlement’, this usually involves very paltry sums of compensation that do not properly reflect the harm and suffering caused to the complainant. Ironically, it is local taxpayers who have to foot the bill for these local settlements. I believe that, in many cases, complainants would be happy to do without these compensation payments if instead they had a proper acknowledgment of the injustice they have been caused. This acknowledgment should take the form of a clear finding of maladministration that is not disguised by any euphemism, and should be accompanied by an instruction to the council that it put things right for the complainant in practical terms. The council would then be better motivated to good practice by the knowledge that any finding of maladministration will be reported as such by the LGO and potentially by the media, and the public would then have a better idea of the extent of maladministration being committed by local councils.
At the moment, most complainants to the LGO, including those with compelling evidence, have their complaints dismissed. The LGO currently has absolute discretion to discontinue an investigation, and to offer any excuse or subterfuge for doing so that comes to mind, or none. The LGO also tends to accept the word of local councils without demanding evidence, whilst ignoring evidence provided by the complainant. The LGO is a biased and profoundly unjust institution that actively works against the good citizen. It is an ugly distortion of what it was set up in 1974 to be. It exists to preserve its own interests, the interests of local authorities, and the interests of its cross-party political supporters in Parliament, all of whom have a vested interest in continuing to disguise the full extent of maladministration and bad practice being committed by local authorities, whatever political party happens to be governing them. (I am a member of the Conservative Party, and am still waiting for my own Party to address the problem of the LGO, after suffering several years of the previous Labour Government ignoring the injustice and actively obstructing the efforts of LGO Watch to expose the LGO and encourage reform.)
When someone who has been treated unjustly by a local authority takes their case to the LGO, and the LGO takes the side of that local authority, the individual who is the now the victim of two tiers of injustice can be effectively silenced by their local authority, which is now able to claim to anyone who asks that the LGO has found in their favour. The complainant therefore ends up in an even worse situation than the one in which they found themself prior to taking their complaint to the LGO.
One thing the Local Government Ombudsman is good at, and which is facilitated by the £20 million per annum of taxpayers' money they receive, is whitewashing their own bad practice and the misery and suffering they cause to so many people. Since LGO Watch was founded in 2003, they have had to expend a lot of money and energy covering up the maladministration they themselves commit, and spin-doctoring their way foward in an attempt to preserve their privileges and the privileges of the very highly-paid local authority CEOs whose councils are guilty of bad practice against taxpayers.
If you have an interest in the LGO for any reason, and have not been taken in by their spin, a good website to visit is this one, and I would recommend first reading the LGO's Fifteen Pillars of Injustice.
The Local Government Ombudsman has now taken its spin-doctoring campaign onto Twitter at @LGOmbudsman and are now using #LGOlive to advance their spin-doctoring PR "Advisory Forum".
Gary Powell
© Gary Powell, 2013
