Our processes

Our processes can be described briefly as follows:

a. Complaint received by council or authority

• We expect complainants to complain to the council first. If you have completed your consideration of a complaint and it is still not resolved, or the complainant has not had a response within a reasonable time, they can come to us.
• It is important when you have finished dealing with a complaint, you tell the complainant they can come to the Ombudsman and make it clear you have completed your consideration of the complaint.

b. Intake

• Our Intake team will clarify if the complainant has completed your complaints process
• If the complainant has not been through your organisation's complaint procedures, Intake will advise them to go back you.
• If the complainant has completed your organisation's complaint procedures, or more information is needed to decide whether the procedures have been completed, the complaint will be passed to our Assessment team.

c. Assessment

• Our Assessment team will clarify:
  • if there are any legal reasons why we could not look at the complaint;
  • if there are other reasons, such as lack of personal injustice, which mean we should not look at the complaint.
• Assessment may contact you for information or to advise you of our decision not to investigate.
• Assessment can close a complaint or send it for investigation.

d. Investigation

• An investigation can take various forms:
  • gathering and analysing evidence;
  • site visits;
  • interviews with officers/staff; and/or
  • file inspections.
• Once an investigation has been concluded, we will issue a final decision to both the organisation and the complainant.

More detailed information about each stage of the process can be found in the manuals which are available here.

Our staff will often contact a council or authority because we need extra information to decide whether we could or should investigate a complaint, or to make a decision about whether there has been any fault in how a council or authority has acted.

The Local Government Act 1974 gives us the powers of the High Court to require the production of evidence or witnesses. While we do not often use those powers formally, we can, if necessary, serve a warrant for information to be provided. Other court decisions, such as the Family Procedure Rules 2010, do not restrict a council’s or authority’s ability to provide us with the information we require.

When someone from our Intake Team contacts you

Our Intake Team may contact you to check if a complainant has been through your complaint procedures. Our Intake Team deal with these enquiries on a rota basis so you will not necessarily be responding to the same person each time.

E-mails are sent from noreply@lgo.org.uk and you will be asked to reply to intakepremenquiries@lgo.org.uk. It is important you do not reply to the e-mail and use the alternative e-mail provided to ensure we receive your response.

We generally expect complainants to be able to provide us with copies of complaint responses and our Intake Team will only contact you if the complainant is unable to do so, for example:

• The individual tells us they have been waiting for a response for some time and have not been updated.
• The organisation’s response to the complaint is unclear about whether it is a final response.
• We need to make reasonable adjustments to support them in making a complaint to us.

The Intake Team will ask you to confirm if the complaint has been through the complaints process. We are just looking for a yes/no type response at this stage and do not need any further information. However, we may ask for a copy of the organisation’s final response.

When someone from an Assessment Team contacts you

The process for deciding whether to investigate has two stages. First, we decide whether the law allows us to investigate. Next, we apply several tests. The most important of these is assessing the level of injustice, either to the person complaining or to others the same matter might also affect.

We will not normally investigate a complaint unless there is good reason to believe the complainant has suffered significant personal injustice as a direct result of the actions or inactions of the organisation. We consider this during our Assessment stage and you can find out more information by looking at our Assessment Code.

A member of our Assessment Team may contact you for further information to help them decide what should happen with a complaint. We may need copies of your responses to the original complaint, or copies of specific documents that relate to the complaint. Our Assessment Team aims to decide whether we should investigate a complaint within 20 working days of us receiving it so we will ask you to provide information quickly. However, at this stage we will only ask you for information you already hold, not to generate new material. It is helpful to us if you can provide the information electronically within the time we ask for, so we can make these quick decisions. It is also worthwhile for you to respond quickly as it may prevent us having to send a complaint for full investigation, which would place a greater burden on your resources.

If Assessment decide the case needs passing on for further work, all the information already provided by the council or authority and the complainant will remain on the case for the Investigation team.

Our Assessment Manual gives more detail about our assessment processes.

When someone from the Investigation Team contacts you

If a complaint has been passed for a full investigation, we will often need to ask you for detailed information about what happened.

A council’s or authority’s response to our enquiries is its opportunity to set out its actions, explain the basis for its decisions and show that it acted properly. Alternatively, if in preparing the information, if it finds there were faults in its process, it is the opportunity to recognise this, apologise and possibly suggest a remedy that it could provide to the complainant.

Our investigators will write to you setting out their enquiries. It is important that you respond fully to any questions put to you and always provide evidence to support what you say. However, please only send the evidence our investigators have asked for, unless you feel there is a crucial piece of information we should also see. If you send significantly more than we have asked for, we may refuse to accept it and will ask you to revise your submission. If you are not sure whether to include a piece of information, or unsure what evidence we require, please contact the investigator directly to discuss.

For fairness, we may share any evidence that we rely on in reaching a decision with complainants so they understand how we make our decisions. This does not mean we share all documents supplied with complainants. We must abide by data protection law. We will not usually share any information about a third party or that is confidential for another reason unless we are required to do so under the law (see Confidentiality and Disclosure).

Rather than send us your response and supporting evidence in a piecemeal fashion, please wait until you have the full response to send to us. If your response is likely to be delayed, please inform the investigator as soon as possible, providing reasons why and giving a clear indication of how much additional time you may need. We understand that in complex cases it can sometimes be difficult to respond to our enquiries in time. When we agree an extension, the response will still be noted as late. This is so we can identify any patterns of repeated extension requests.

We ask councils and authorities to ensure that all those involved in the events surrounding a complaint are given the opportunity to respond to the complaint; this includes ex-employees and contractors. It is a legal requirement that any person or body directly involved in the actions complained about are made aware of our investigation and have an opportunity to comment. Current employees should provide their comments along with the council’s or authority’s response to our enquiries, however ex-employees and contractors can, if they choose, contact us directly. It is important that officer and third-party comments are clearly marked so these are not confused for the organisation’s corporate response. We only expect you to make reasonable efforts to contact ex-employees – for example by writing to them at their last known address.

Should a current employee contact us directly as a ‘whistleblower’, this is a separate issue covered by the Public Interest Disclosure Act. Such evidence can be taken into account but it does not form part of the corporate response to our enquiries. In such cases, our staff will need to take legal and management advice about how the information should be used and how it will be communicated to both the council or authority and the complainant.

Our Investigation Manual gives more detail about our investigation processes.

Responding to the Ombudsman

Where we write to a council or authority we will address the letter to the Chief Executive or Chief officer/ Head of Paid Service as they are the appropriate representative of the council or authority as a legal entity. We will however also send the letter to the link officer designated by the council. If you realise that two different investigators are contacting you about the same complaint/issue but from different complainants, please let us know so we can link the two investigations together.

Ideally, we would like you to respond to us by email. Our staff have separate e-mails for casework which are linked to our complaints database. These end @coinweb.lgo.org.uk and it is important you ensure e-mails from this domain are not blocked by your IT systems. For non-casework issues we will use @lgo.org.uk email addresses and it is important that these are also not blocked by your IT systems as we may need to contact you about other issues such as your organisation’s performance or changes to our processes. Our domains should be added to your organisation’s allow list sometimes referred to as a whitelist. Please speak to your IT team about this.

There is a 20MB limit on incoming emails so you may need to break information down into smaller subsets. We encrypt and authenticate email in transit by supporting Transport Layer Security (TLS) and Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC). We support TLS version 1.2 and later for sending and receiving email securely. We also use additional encryption (Egress Switch) when sending email if it meets our criteria for additional encryption - this is set out in our Information Security Policy on our website. We regularly review our email compliance and comply with all necessary email security.

If you need to send large amounts of information to us (i.e. more than 20GB) you should discuss this with the Investigator in the first instance as we may not need all the information you are planning to send. Where it remains necessary to send large amounts of information you can do so through encrypted online file transfer systems or secure online portals (e.g. Sharepoint, Galaxkey Egress Switch etc). It is important that our staff are not required to set up an account to login to view files. One Time Passwords (OTPs) should be used where possible. These systems should not be used to send routine communications such acknowledgement emails.

Because of data protection risks, we cannot accept documents that include embedded documents. Please do not send us any information that includes embedded documents (which appear as a small picture of a document which opens up the document when you click on it).

Instead please only send us the information we have asked for as attachments or through encrypted file transfer systems. If you do share embedded information with us, we will delete it on receipt and ask you to resend it as attachments.

All case records are held on our complaints database, including the evidence supplied by a complainant, the council or authority concerned, or any third party. Our complaints database will only accept the following file types:

File inspections and officer interviews

Occasionally an investigator will need to see an organisation’s records or interview the council or authority officers or members involved. The investigator will contact the council or authority to make arrangements to visit the offices, or arrange a telephone or video call to carry out the tasks they need. If they need to interview officers or members, they will send you the details of who they need to speak to. If you feel they also need to speak to others, you should tell the investigator. The investigator will decide whether the interviews need to take place in person, over the telephone or via video conferencing software such as Microsoft Teams.

The investigator will send you a set of notes that should be provided to each interviewee before the interview. Interviewees can, if they wish, have someone to sit with them during the interviews however this should not be a manager from the service, someone from the complaints section or a legal officer of the authority. The officer or member being interviewed should also have the opportunity to look at the relevant authority documents or files before the interview.

When carrying out file inspections or interviews at your offices, investigators need somewhere quiet and private. If they are reviewing the file, they will need an officer available to show them how any electronic systems work or to operate the system for them. They may also need facilities to print or copy relevant documents from the file.

Confidentiality and disclosure of information

When investigating a complaint we become a Data Controller under the ICO definition, alongside the council or authority which also remains as a Data Controller. We will process personal data in accordance with our Data Controller status and retain personal data in accordance with our retention schedules. If you wish to request that we do not disclose information under a Subject Access Request you should follow the process set out below in relation to the serving of 32(3) notices. However, please be aware these notices can only be served in limited circumstances.

Complainants can make subject access requests under the Data Protection Act (DPA), or Freedom of Information Act requests for complaint file material. We follow the Information Commissioner’s guidance that material on complaint files constitutes the complainant’s personal data, so any material sent to us is usually disclosable under the DPA, unless one of the exemptions apply. (We do not generally disclose any information from complaint files in response to a Freedom of Information request). We have had cases where we have had to disclose information a council or authority has not wanted to be shared with the complainant because it had provided evidence over and above what we had asked for or what was necessary. Therefore, it is important to only send us what we ask for.

Section 32(3) of the Local Government Act 1974 allows a council or authority to serve a notice on the Ombudsman to keep information confidential where disclosure of the document would be contrary to the public interest. Where a council or authority feels a 32(3) notice needs to be served, the document(s) it relates to should be clearly marked and the council or authority should explain in writing why the information should not be disclosed and clearly mark it as such. For example, a complaint about procurement processes may involve us looking at all the bids received and it would not be appropriate to share all the bid details with the complainant. A section 32(3) notice must be sent to us by post; an email or letter attached to an email is not sufficient to meet the requirements of the Act. If we disagree with a council or authority about the 32(3) notice and this cannot be resolved, we can apply to the Secretary of State to discharge it.

It is not necessary to serve a 32(3) notice on third party information as the Ombudsman cannot disclose this to a complainant under DPA rules. The council is often best placed to decide what can and cannot be disclosed to a complainant. To help us reduce the risk of inadvertent disclosure, if you are sending information which you consider should not be disclosed:

• please clearly identify it and say why it should not be shared;
• send it separately to the information which can be shared;
• send a redacted and non-redacted version;
• please bear in mind that names and contact details of your own staff and those employed by other organisations are third party information;
• if any of your documents contain details of individuals with whom the complainant has had no previous contact and which are not publicly available, please provide two copies: one that has this personal information redacted and a non-redacted version.

The Local Government Act 1974 states that our investigations should be conducted in private. As such, neither a council, authority nor a complainant should publish any correspondence about the complaint. If a council or authority receives an FOI request about a specific complaint that has been to the Ombudsman, it should not disclose any information whatsoever, citing section 44(1)(a) of the Freedom of Information Act; this includes whether a complaint to the Ombudsman from a specific individual even exists. If the request is about general statistics and complaint numbers, a council or authority can signpost the requester to the relevant section of our website where we publish statistics on complaints received against bodies in jurisdiction.

If you need any information about our service, you can contact our External Training & Relationship Lead who can either signpost you to relevant information on our website or obtain the information you are seeking. This will often be faster than making a formal Freedom of Information request.

We publish copies of our guidance to staff on our website for transparency. If there is anything you are unable to find please let us know.

Interaction with the complainant while we investigate

You do not have to continue responding to the complainant about the matter we are investigating while we investigate. However, you should continue to deal with any new or unrelated matters in accordance with your local complaint handling process.

If your view of the complaint we are investigating changes during our investigation you may wish to suggest a remedy for any injustice that may have been caused. If this is the case speak to your investigator.

When it comes to front line services, we cannot tell a council what to do while we are considering a complaint. The law says the council should continue to deal with things in the normal way. This includes any annual reviews or assessments that are due, including those that become due while we investigate.

In some cases, we will ask a council to consider putting specific actions on hold (e.g. debt recovery/ enforcement) until we have completed our investigation. This is because the outcome of our investigation will have a direct impact on whether to proceed with that action. Carrying them out during our investigation could therefore avoidably increase the injustice to the complainant if there has been fault.