Local Government
Ombudsman Watch submission for meeting of 7 October 2014 at the Cabinet Office
with Rt Hon Oliver Letwin MP and Mr Robert Gordon CB.
Gary Powell, founder and former
director of Local Government Ombudsman Watch.
“Governance Review of the Local Government Ombudsman Service” (November 2013) by Mr Robert Gordon.
Mr Gordon’s report is available at http://bit.ly/1cdzedL.
In point 10,
Mr Gordon presents the following as one of the two key questions that
represented the terms of reference for his report:
“Does the current structure and
governance of the Local Government Ombudsman Service (as provided in statute
and as operated in practice) encourage or inhibit the provision of a redress
service which meets the generally accepted principles of good complaint
handling?”
An
investigation into the probity and impartiality of the LGO, considering the
evidence provided to the select committee by users of the LGO “service” and
published in the select committee report he was directed to read, was therefore
clearly a part of Mr Gordon’s remit.
Mr Gordon refers
to having had “40 meetings” in order to prepare his report (point 6) and having
consulted “a wide cross-section of expert opinion” (point 9): yet his list of
“acknowledgments” in Annex C consists of 37 individuals, many of whom work for
the LGO, and not one of whom represents citizens who have used the LGO service
at first hand and who have campaigned for reform or abolition of the LGO. LGO
Watch has existed since 2003. Its two directors, Trevor R Nunn and I, have both
had extensive evidence published by the CLG Committee and its predecessor, the
ODPM Committee, in their reports following LGO enquiries since 2005.
The terms of reference of the Review include an
instruction that Mr Gordon “will have regard to the report of the CLG Select
Committee on the work of the Local Government Ombudsman,” (the report referred
to being the 3rd report, published in July 2012); to “the external evaluation chaired by Richard
Thomas, Chair of AJTC, following the recommendation of the CLG Select Committee”;
and to “all other information and material available to him which he considers
relevant, such as staff survey results.”
In the 2012
CLG Committee report http://bit.ly/Oh8opL,
there was extensive damning evidence published that had been submitted by users
of the LGO “service” http://bit.ly/Nhb0j7, including
detailed submissions from the current director of LGO Watch, Mr Trevor R Nunn http://bit.ly/QSFhGR as current director of LGO
Watch, and evidence from me http://bit.ly/MWMxnq
informed by my experience as the previous director of LGO Watch.
There was therefore
an excellent opportunity for Mr Gordon to learn from the published experiences
of people who had actually used the LGO service, and who had been researching
the LGO for several years and campaigning to expose its serious faults, and to
include reference to our evidence in his report. Yet he did not do so. So we
have here yet another report on the LGO where the experience and evidence of
actual complainants and members of the public are brushed under the carpet;
disregarded; treated as though they are of no value. Treated as though they do
not exist.
The continued
tendency of those charged with conducting “independent” reviews of the LGO to
ignore, or even, in the case of Dr Kirkham – more about him later - to flagrantly misrepresent the evidence of
campaigners and complainants, reflects nothing less than an attitude of
contempt towards members of the public who are revealing truths that are
uncomfortable to a self-interested section of the political and civil service
establishment.
The CLG Committee’s “Fifth Report” on
the LGO.
Since Mr
Gordon published his report, the CLG Committee has published a further report
on the LGO http://bit.ly/1oHwXeJ. (Although
it is published as the “Fifth Report”, and Mr Gordon’s report comments on the
Third Report, I have been unable to confirm the existence of any Fourth Report,
and no mention is made of it on the List of Reports from the Committee during
the current Parliament http://bit.ly/1tnRg25.)
I had provided three detailed submissions for this
enquiry that were published by the CLG Committee, even though the online
publication of the Fifth Report lists them, refers to them as being “published
written evidence”, yet does not link to them, so that anyone reading the report
and wishing to read these (and other) evidence submissions would have a very
hard time finding them http://bit.ly/1vBpBO1. As
was the case with my submissions for the 2005 and 2012 reports, I provided incontrovertible
evidence that demonstrated the LGO’s institutional pro-council bias and moral
corruption, including this time a submission based on the damning LGO staff
satisfaction survey that had been leaked to LGO Watch, and a submission
demonstrating that the “Independent External Review” had in fact been largely
carried out and drafted by a longstanding pro-LGO propagandist, Dr Richard
Kirkham, who had been known to LGO Watch since 2005.
These three submissions can be read here:
Dr Richard Kirkham is the person who wrote an article in
2005 after the LGO had begun to come under scrutiny, entitled, “A Complainant's
View of the Local Government Ombudsman.” This was a strongly pro-LGO article,
with a very odd title. It was odd because Dr Richard Kirkham gave no indication
in his article that he had ever been a complainant to the LGO, or that he had
interviewed any complainants to the LGO in order to inform his article. He also
made no reference to the evidence of widespread dissatisfaction on the part of
complainants to the LGO, as evidenced by the MORI polls carried out by the LGO
themselves, which were even damning after the LGO had been allowed to remove,
at their complete discretion, 10% of the sample selected for interview by MORI.
Dr Kirkham also failed to accurately represent the
substance and detail of the complaints submitted by Mr Nunn and by myself. All
this, yet he decided to call his article “A Complainant’s View”. Yet Dr Kirkham
was appointed by the LGO to be a member of the three-person team carrying out
the so-called “Independent External Review” into the LGO. Not only that, but Dr
Kirkham was described in the report as having undertaken the “bulk of the research and drafting of this
Report for which his colleagues are most grateful." (p4). Please do
note that, despite this review purporting to be “independent”, the LGO were
allowed to appoint their own reviewers.
One of my submissions to the CLG Committee was based on
the damning leaked 2012 staff survey. When LGO staff completed this survey,
they believed that the results would not be made available to the public, and would
only be circulated internally. The results were so shocking that a member of
LGO staff leaked the report to LGO Watch. What their own staff said about the
LGO as an institution, and about their senior management, is contained in the link
above. When the LGO was questioned at the subsequent CLG Committee Oral Evidence
Session, the Chair of the CLG Committee was clearly far more concerned about
the report having been leaked than about the pitifully low level of confidence
their own staff had in the LGO.
Loyalty to the LGO versus loyalty to
the Nation’s citizens and taxpayers.
In 1995, when
Sir Geoffrey Chipperfield’s report was published recommending abolition of the
Local Government Ombudsman, it was regarded as politically incorrect to
disparage ombudsmen, and Sir Geoffrey’s recommendations were unable to prevail
in such a climate. My experience as director of LGO Watch led me to the
conclusion that nothing has changed.
Where the LGO
is concerned, a loyalty that leads to the suppression and misrepresentation of compelling
evidence is a misplaced loyalty indeed. Furthermore, this kind of loyalty
represents a profound disloyalty to the citizens of this country who are paying
for a service that undermines their attempts to gain justice. The “political
correctness” that has protected the LGO for so long is egregious, and indeed is
just as egregious as the kind of “political correctness” that in recent years
has protected criminals in Rotherham despite numerous complaints and
significant evidence having been presented to authorities that did not want to
listen.
The symmetry
between the Rotherham phenomenon, where complaints and evidence were ignored
again and again by the relevant authorities, and the LGO phenomenon, where the
same thing has happened, is striking. Such is the ability of powerful
institutions with significant resources at their disposal to bury serious and
justified complaints, to sideline conscientious complainants who present
compelling evidence, and to hide bad practice behind a fog of Kafkaesque
subterfuge. It is my belief that the seriousness and extensiveness of the harm
and injustice caused over a long period of time by LGO maladministration and
bias may well be at least as serious as the harm and injustice suffered by so
many children in Rotherham. Just in respect of the potential gravity of cases
covered by the LGO’s remit, one only needs to remind oneself that the LGO is
responsible for investigating complaints about adult social care.
It is my
belief that the reaction of the general public to the Rotherham scandal, and to
the way institutions ignored serious complaints of wrongdoing, represents a
turning-point in the consciousness of the good people of this land, where the
sense of resignation and hopelessness with regard to having one’s complaint
against a powerful institution properly considered and responded to, is giving
way to a sense of outrage at how we are being let down by certain institutions,
and then by secondary institutions that are supposed to be monitoring the
primary institutions and putting the injustices right.
The Local Government Ombudsman comes
under the spotlight.
The LGO was
first subjected to an inquiry by the predecessor to the CLG Committee, the ODPM
Committee, in 2005.
The
2005 ODPM Committee Report on the “Role and Effectiveness of the Local
Government Ombudsmen for England” is available online here:
The content of the evidence provided by LGO
Watch is summarised here:
The effect of LGO pro-council bias on
human lives.
The text of
Mr Gordon’s report avoids any mention of the experience and evidence of
complainants to the LGO published in select committee reports since 2005, and
his report fails even to give any hint of the human misery and profound
injustice that the LGO, with its current ethos, has caused and is causing. Associated
with every episode of serious maladministration carried out by the LGO, whether
through indifference, negligence, incompetence or blatant bias, is a human
being who has the potential to be seriously harmed by that maladministration.
When I was
director of LGO Watch, I used to receive e-mails from people who had clearly
been caused serious injustice by their local authority, and then again by the
Local Government Ombudsman who had given that authority a clean bill of health
despite compelling evidence of maladministration with serious injustice. I had
people telling me they were so desperate that they were seriously considering
suicide, having run out of options. The LGO having unjustly found in favour of
the council had only served to make matters worse, as the council could then
refer to the finding in order to close the complaint and provide false
vindication of what they had done to that citizen. The degree of callousness I
witnessed that was meted out by the LGO to decent and very vulnerable people
was absolutely appalling.
There is
something distinctly Orwellian about the way the Local Government Ombudsman
institution spends taxpayers’ money spinning its way out of difficulties, and
how sections of the British establishment seem to be keen to keep a lid on the
evidence of systemic maladministration, incompetence and dishonesty at the
office of the LGO that has been exposed over the past decade by LGO Watch and
others. This Orwellian character extends to those who wish to preserve the
LGO’s status quo, and simply tinker
about with the edges instead of abolishing the institution and replacing it
with one that properly serves good citizens and taxpayers, rather than
discriminating against them. It also extends to the reviewers who are unlikely
to expose uncomfortable truths when that entails rocking the boat and upsetting
their colleagues.
This is
something I do not say as an iconoclast, or some kind of hot-headed,
anti-establishment radical overstating his case. I am a political activist in
the Conservative Party and, in many respects, a “conservative” with a small “c”
as well. I am a patriot, and am proud of the degree of freedom, justice and
democracy that the people of this country enjoy. On the whole, I am someone who
supports the status quo; but I remain
unwilling to see a rotten and corrupt taxpayer-funded institution betraying my
fellow citizens, and betraying the fundamental British values of decency and
justice: a betrayal that, far too often, has enjoyed the collusion of the very
people who have the power to end this injustice.
Corruption at the Local Government
Ombudsman’s office.
During the
meeting at the Cabinet Office of 24 July this year, I outlined some of the
evidence of serious systemic maladministration and corruption at the LGO’s
office. The detail of this shocking maladministration, dishonesty and
corruption can be read in the CLG Committee’s reports via the links above. None
of the pre-2013 evidence in the above links was referred to in Mr Gordon’s
report, and the existence of LGO Watch, now over ten years old, did not even
get a single mention in it.
MORI customer satisfaction polls.
Those present
at the 24 July meeting will have heard me talk about the LGO’s own MORI Customer
Satisfaction Poll in 1999. The LGO was allowed, at its own discretion, to
remove 10% of those initially selected for telephone interview by MORI. Even then, the survey revealed a 73%
complainant dissatisfaction level with its service. 61% of complainants
expressed themselves to be ‘very dissatisfied’ with the final outcome of their
complaint. Roughly 50% of those whose complaints had been upheld reported
dissatisfaction with the outcome. This evidence was in the 2012 CLG Committee
report, but Mr Gordon has made no mention of it.
The Local Government Ombudsman’s “Independent”
External Review.
I have
already referred above to the role of Dr Richard Kirkham as a key propagandist
for the LGO who took over the bulk of the work for the LGO’s so-called
“Independent External Review”. In 2012, the CLG Committee instructed the LGO to
carry out an Independent External Review of its service. The LGO was however
allowed to appoint its own reviewers, which was surely not a measure that
inspires confidence in objectivity and impartiality. One of the three reviewers
appointed was Dr Richard Kirkham. Dr
Kirkham, an academic at Sheffield University, was already as long ago as 2005
identified by LGO Watch as the LGO’s most enthusiastic non-employee
propagandist, to the extent that LGO Watch set up a page on its website
dedicated to Dr Kirkham in 2009.
Yet Mr Gordon refers to this “Independent Review” uncritically throughout his
report.
Where in his
article Dr Kirkham did refer to evidence that we, as complainants, had provided
to the ODPM Committee, he did so selectively, completely ignoring the detailed
analysis of, and commentary on, the MORI Customer Satisfaction Survey that we
had provided to the Committee, and ascribing to us views that we had clearly not
expressed and did not hold.
Dr Kirkham’s
2005 article was a whitewash, and a model exercise in constructing straw men
and ignoring inconvenient evidence. In Dr Kirkham’s own words from his 2005
article: “There has never been any
serious allegation that the LGO act in any other way but according to the
highest standards of public conduct.” (ibid., p 388). Dr Kirkham wrote this
after reading the LGO Watch submissions to the ODPM Committee, and in full
knowledge of the devastating results of the LGO’s own MORI Customer
Satisfaction Surveys.
Staff Satisfaction Survey
One of the
above links leads to a submission where I exposed what the LGO’s own staff had
to say about them in their 2012 Staff Satisfaction Survey http://bit.ly/1CJydGk. Staff were informed the
results were only for internal circulation, but a member of their staff leaked
them to LGO Watch. The LGO published a document that was
supposed to be a summary of and response to the survey. This “summary” was very selective,
and it epitomised the LGO’s systemic dishonesty and attempt to hoodwink the
public. One of the most striking examples of dishonesty in this summary was
where the LGO wrote: “39% believe we provide a great service to our customers
but 34% are undecided,” whilst completely failing to mention that
27% positively disagreed with the statement.
I have written at greater length on the 2012 LGO Staff Survey here:
This 2012 staff survey was damning of the LGO institution, and the
absence of any reference to the results in Mr Gordon’s report is striking. Here
is just one of the many shocking findings of the staff survey: Statement: “Our LGOs demonstrate good leadership skills.” A
total of 80% of respondents disagreed, with 46% strongly disagreeing.”
Surely Mr Gordon should have commented on that finding alone in his report.
Summary
In the course of the past decade, the current director of LGO Watch, Mr
Trevor R. Nunn, and I, have spent a great deal of time researching the LGO’s
activities, trying to expose its subterfuge and dishonesty, and learning from
the experience of the many users of the LGO’s putative “service” who have contacted
us, as well as trying to help them on a practical and an emotional level as
best we could. Some of those complainants did not have a valid case that fell
within the LGO’s remit, and had not been treated unfairly either by the council
or the LGO, and were clearly persistently vexatious complainants. They quickly
turned their vexatiousness on us when we told them what they did not want to
hear.
Nevertheless, many people had received a “double-whammy” of
maladministration with injustice: first from their local authority, and then
from the LGO. Mr Nunn and I have also observed how the CLG Committee and those
entrusted with carrying out reviews of the LGO are very reluctant indeed to grasp
the nettle and consider the considerable and extensive evidence provided to the
CLG Committee that the LGO is corrupted, not fit for purpose, and not
reformable on account of an entrenched self-serving and biased ethos.
The LGO is a public spending outrage. Given the extent of the injustice
meted out by the LGO, and its incompetence, the greatest benefit to the good
citizens of this country would be to abolish the LGO altogether and to replace
it with regional or local appeals tribunals, ideally staffed by competent
volunteers drawn from the local community. This would be a measure that rescues
the taxpayer from a situation where he is currently paying an institution a
large amount of money just to prevent him achieving justice should he suffer
maladministration with significant injustice at the hands of a local authority.
In fact, the LGO is such an appalling outfit that the citizens of this
country would even be better off if the LGO were simply disbanded and not
replaced with anything. At the moment, many of those who have been wronged by a
local authority end up having their injustice compounded when the LGO finds in
that local authority’s favour despite compelling evidence, as it so often does.
The local authority can then refer to the finding of the LGO to close down the
complaint, and can refer to it in vindication should the media make any
enquiries, given that unless members of the general public have used the LGO’s
“service”, they have no idea how corrupt it is.
The LGO is a bureaucratic behemoth that is protected by a well-honed edifice
of subterfuge and by its allies in various sections of the British
establishment. LGO Watch has made enormous efforts to encourage responsible
politicians to respond to the evidence of systemic corruption and
maladministration at the LGO’s office. The indifference of the CLG Committee
and of its predecessor, the ODPM Committee, to the compelling evidence we have
provided, is disgraceful. The political establishment seems to be very
reluctant to call into question the integrity of this institution, and has been
simply disregarding evidence that it finds uncomfortable. This is having the
effect of alienating citizens from those they elect to serve them, and further
undermining public confidence in the integrity of our political structures and in
the accountability of our politicians and our political system as a whole.
It is time for the “political correctness” that has been protecting the
ombudsmen to be set aside, and for the LGO to be subjected to honest scrutiny:
a scrutiny that must include objective and conscientious consideration of the
very extensive evidence that has been supplied to the select committee over the
course of a decade, and that has been brushed under the carpet as too
inconvenient, too embarrassing, and too “off-message” to deal with. Up until
now, those trying to expose the LGO have been treated by those with the power
to bring about change and reform as though we were the problem.
Rotherham should remain a stark reminder of just where this kind of paradigm
can lead.
Gary Powell
October 2014
