Archived decisions

Contact: Vicky Jolly tel: (01962) 84 5909 [email protected]

1. Summary

1.1 The purpose of this report is to update Members on the arrangements in place for handling complaints, including the mechanisms for ensuring that issues are raised with Members and Officers so that the organisation learns from the complaints received. The recent Comprehensive Performance Assessment highlighted that there was a need for the County Council to demonstrate that it is learning from complaints. This is a high priority for the Complaints & Information Compliance Team (C&ICT), and work has started to use the Contact Centre systems to support this work

2. Recommendations

2.1 The Committee is asked to:

a) note the improvements planned and implemented to meet the CPA requirements

b) endorse the approach being proposed for improved complaints handling

3. The Current Complaints Process

3.1 This is outlined in the County Council's "Factsheet 4" Factsheets. The County Council has identified the importance of dealing with complaints promptly and effectively, and so uses a three stage approach to complaints. This ensures that there is a robust mechanism for responding to complaints by encouraging complaints to be dealt with at source initially, but it ensures that there is a system to escalate a complaint through the organisation. There is increasing use of the County's website to raise complaints. Hantsweb - Suggestions & Complaints

3.2 Any complainant that is not satisfied with Hampshire County Council's response is given information regarding their right to complain to the Local Government Ombudsman.

4. Recent Improvements

4.1 The development of an integrated corporate Complaints and Information Compliance Team (C&ICT), linking complaints to other information compliance issues (such as Data Protection, Freedom of Information and RIPA) has ensured a consistency in processes, and a sharing of information to enable more effective responses.

4.2 The use of the team also provides an economy of scale enabling the team to handle workload peaks and troughs more effectively. Since this team has been in place the response times to corporate complaints has been reduced and new complaints are handled within the deadline.

5. Communication and Support

5.1 The C&IC Team work closely with the Departmental Complaints Co-ordinators and other managers to ensure that they have the expertise and knowledge to respond to their departmental complaints. There is a well established co-ordinators forum which highlights best practice and any problem areas. This also serves as a way to ensure that departments are aware of any changes in guidance.

5.2 These co-ordinators are responsible for highlighting issues within their department, and they report to their departmental management teams, ensuring that Officers are updated of issues as appropriate.

5.3 In addition, the Complaints & Information Compliance Team report to the Chief Executive's Departmental Management Team.

5.4 There is an annual report to Governance Committee. The last report was on 28^th June 2007. See report 070628-govctt-R0621121503 . This ensures that Members are aware of the management arrangements and key issues arising from complaints.

6. Plans for Improvements

6.1 The CPA inspection has further emphasised the need to look for ways to continually improve our handling of complaints by highlighting the need to learn from complaints. The first step to achieving this was the establishment of the specialised Complaints and Information Compliance Team. Now the team is developing other recommendations for improvements.

6.2 The integration of complaints with the contact centre, including the customer contact software system Lagan CRM brings an opportunity to review our current processes, and incorporate them into the electronic system. Work is underway to integrate all stages of complaints into Lagan CRM. This represents a significant change to our processes and will need careful planning and consultation which is already underway.

6.3 The use of Lagan CRM will achieve several improvements. It will improve the business processes, increase our ability to cross reference complaints by departments, as well as enhance the data available for reporting. Through the Lagan CRM system clear reporting on numbers, types, and response rates will be available for complaints throughout the process. This will help to highlight services which receive a high proportion of similar complaints and help to focus effort on improvements.

6.4 As outlined at Governance Committee, the central Complaints & Information Compliance Team has concentrated effort in the past year into developing processes, and ensuring there is no backlog of complaints. Further work by this team planned for the next year includes enhanced corporate and departmental reporting, reviewing policies according to Ombudsman guidelines, benchmarking against other local authorities, and considering appropriate accreditation.

6.5 The team will also be developing the complaints network within HCC and clarifying the role of the departmental co-ordinator as they play a critical role in the arrangements for complaints handling.

7. Conclusion

7.1 The County Council has a robust system for managing complaints from the public, which will be enhanced by the introduction of the new systems and processes associated with the introduction of the Contact Centre software Lagan CRM. This will enable the County Council to log, monitor and respond to complaints at all stages of the process, and ensure that any areas for concern are highlighted promptly. The discipline of adopting the new technology will also help to clarify procedures and responsibility and ensure that there is appropriate corporate accountability.

Section 100 D - Local Government Act 1972 - background documents

The following documents discuss facts or matters on which this report, or an important part of it, is based and have been relied upon to a material extent in the preparation of this report.

NB: the list excludes:

1. Published works

2. Documents which disclose exempt or confidential information as defined in the Act.