Are you thinking of making a complaint to the
Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman?
Members of PHSOtheFACTS have been monitoring the work of the Ombudsman since 2013. We act as a support group and information service. We hope you will be fully informed of how the Ombudsman really works and why it fails to deliver justice and closure.
In April 2017 Rob Behrens CBE replaced Dame Julie Mellor as the Ombudsman. In his pre-appointment interview he was full of praise for the previous policy of investigating more complaints.
One of the good things that PHSO has done, particularly since the Titcombe affair, has been to increase the number of cases that it has taken on, and I think that is absolutely right.
https://committees.parliament.uk/oralevidence/6568/pdf/ Q15
Yet his ‘back to basics’ three year reform programme saw an immediate decline in both investigations and upholds. In 2022/23 just 1.7% of all complaints received a detailed investigation and only 1.2% were upheld to some degree. When so few investigations are carried out it makes you wonder – What’s the point of the Ombudsman?
You can see that the steep decline in both investigations and upholds coincided with the arrival of Rob Behrens in April 2017.
There was an immediate cut to staffing following Behrens appointment in 2017, as the office faced financial cuts of approximately 25% and relocated to Manchester, leading to a loss of experienced case-workers.
The numbers began to increase after 2020 but the staff to investigation ratio continued to fall.
In terms of access to justice, under Behrens tenure it has also become more difficult to obtain an upheld decision – falling to just 89 cases in 2022/23. Put this against a background of declining public services since austerity measure cutbacks (2010) and a growing crisis in NHS provision and the data appears to reflect a deliberate policy rather than an actual improvement in service delivery and complaint handling.
Behrens was critical of the time taken by PHSO to deal with complaints in his pre-appointment interview and aimed to;
…try to bring down the average time it takes for complaints to be processed by the organisation. As I understand it from the annual report, the average handling time at the moment is 263 days. As an ombudsman, and with respect to those who are involved in it, that is far too long. I notice that in 100 days of those 263 days nothing happens, so there are backlogs and queues. That is part of the frustration that users feel about coming to the PHSO …
https://committees.parliament.uk/oralevidence/6568/pdf/
The pandemic lockdowns in 2020 have to be taken into account, but prior to that time there was no improvement in time taken to investigate complaints, despite the cut in the number of investigations.
Anxious to clear the backlog following the closure of PHSO during the pandemic, (2020) Behrens brought in a new classification – lower severity of injustice – and used this to close down cases without investigation. This has now been embedded as part of their normal practice. Without considering all the evidence PHSO will only investigate your complaint if they feel it has had a significant ‘impact’. PHSO are now and always have been, very efficient at closing down complaints.
The reduction in both upholds and investigations should have led to a decline in customer satisfaction at PHSO. After all, people approach the Ombudsman because they believe he will give them an impartial decision and resolve their complaint. Prior to 2020 PHSO published customer satisfaction data according to whether the complaint was upheld. It can be seen that even with fully upheld complaints there was a degree of dissatisfaction.
In 2016 The Service Charter was introduced to monitor complainants’ levels of satisfaction over a range of issues.
The Service Charter makes commitments about the service we provide at different stages of our process and focuses on what complainants have told us is most important for them to have confidence in our decisions.
We use these commitments to measure how well we are delivering our service and understand where we need to improve.
https://www.ombudsman.org.uk/service-charter
Although the design of the service charter questionnaire was to ‘measure how well we are delivering our service’ Amanda Amroliwala, the CEO, revealed at the the 2022 PACAC scrutiny meeting that changes to service delivery did not affect the service charter scores.
“service changes [do] not have any causal impact on the Service Charter scores because that is measuring the experience from the customer’s perspective”.
https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/34659/documents/190769/default/ p13
If changes to service are not measured then what is being measured by these service charter scores? In May 2020 the Patients Association reviewed the service charter data and concluded that there were few trends to measure. Is this data so manipulated as to be meaningless?
Its own Service Charter data shows a mix of modest improvement, overall flatlining and slight deterioration, depending on the measure in question.
https://www.patients-association.org.uk/Blog/phso-the-facts-and-evidence
Although there has been little change overall, the score for the commitment entitled “We will explain our decision…” has decreased from 59% to 49% over the last 7 years. Understanding how a decision has been reached is probably the most important aspect of a complaint.
Service Charter Measurement of Impartiality Never Reported
When the Service Charter was introduced one of the key metrics was entitled “We will….make an impartial decision…”. No score for impartiality was ever reported and after 2018-19 this KPI was quietly removed from the Service Charter commitments reported in the Annual Reports, despite it being a specific commitment made when the Service Charter was introduced.
Service Charter Measurement of Impartiality Improvised
In 2019 Opinion Research Services (ORS) was commissioned by the PHSO to investigate and recommend a way to measure impartiality. It was claimed that impartiality was “too complex a concept to be effectively assessed via a questionnaire”
Instead ORS improvised a measurement of supposed impartiality by combining the responses to 4 other commitments in the Service Charter. Rob Behrens then include a mention of impartiality in his foreword to the most recent PHSO Annual Report, as if users had actually rated the impartiality at 77 percent.
User rating of our impartiality currently stands at 77 per cent.
https://www.ombudsman.org.uk/sites/default/files/886%20PHSO%20Annual%20Report%20and%20Accounts%202022-23%20FINAL%20ONLINE.pdf p8
Alternatively, the data from Trustpilot and Google, which is gathered independent of the Ombudsman, shows a stark increase in adverse comments regarding the service provided. They have been grouped by subject matter quoted in the review with far more people reporting the Ombudsman to be ‘ineffective’ as indeed would be the case if your complaint has been refused investigation and/or uphold.
You can see the most recent Trustpilot comments here.
The chances are that your complaint to the Ombudsman will deliver neither justice nor closure. It will most likely cause secondary harm as you struggle with their illogical processes.
If you are looking to hold the Ombudsman to account you will find that PHSO manage all complaints about their service internally – as described in their Review and Feedback Guidance policy.
When someone is unhappy with the decision we have made on their case, or the service they have experienced, we expect them to initially raise their concerns with the original case owner, or if a service complaint, their manager. This is because the person who handled the case is normally best placed to resolve any concerns and answer questions about it.
https://www.ombudsman.org.uk/sites/default/files/Service_Model_Review_and_Feedback_Guidance_11_Final.pdf p3
If you have a strong case against a public body your best option may be to find a solicitor who will give you a no-win no-fee deal and take that body directly to court rather than waste your time with the Ombudsman. A flawed Ombudsman’s report can be used against you in court and the endless delay may cause you to be out of time for legal action.
Bear in mind that the whole complaint system and that includes legal challenges is set up in favour of the public bodies.
When Rob Behrens first arrived we outlined the main issues complainants had with the Ombudsman service welcome-mr-behrens-here-is-your-starter-for-10 and many of these problems still exist today, such as, failing to investigate valid complaints, timing out complaints which were submitted within the 12 month period, ignoring evidence from the complainant and bias towards the public body under investigation.
If you want to get involved or want more information you can join the PHSOtheFACTS support group by contacting; phso-thefact@outlook.com
In this video Della Reynolds, coordinator for PHSOtheFACTS talks to staff at IPSIS, later to become HSIB (Healthcare Safety Investigation Branch) then HSSIB (Health Service Safety Investigations Body) about the complainant’s journey. For context the 35% uphold rate mentioned refers to 35% of investigations undertaken not 35% of all complaints.
phsothetruestory 