London Borough of Camden (20 005 509)
The Ombudsman's final decision:
Summary: Mr X complains a Council officer wrongly told a colleague he was abusive in a telephone call. The Ombudsman will not investigate as he cannot change the outcome of the complaint and the injustice to Mr X is not sufficient to warrant his involvement.
The complaint
- Mr X complains a Council officer wrongly told a colleague he was abusive in a telephone call.
The Ombudsman’s role and powers
- We investigate complaints about ‘maladministration’ and ‘service failure’. In this statement, I have used the word ‘fault’ to refer to these. We must also consider whether any fault has had an adverse impact on the person making the complaint. I refer to this as ‘injustice’. We provide a free service, but must use public money carefully. We may decide not to start or continue with an investigation if we believe the injustice is not significant enough to justify our involvement, or it is unlikely further investigation will lead to a different outcome (Local Government Act 1974, section 24A(6), as amended)
How I considered this complaint
- I have considered what Mr X said in his complaint and sent him my draft findings on it for his comment. Mr X made not further comment.
What I found
- Mr X complains he received an email from a Council officer which said Mr X had been abusive to another Council officer during a phone call about his housing situation.
- Mr X says he was not abusive and is unhappy about the Council’s investigation of his complaint.
- The Council says the call was not recorded. It says the officer that sent the email had spoken to the officer in question and was satisfied their description of the call was genuine. It says another member of staff saw the officer in question upset after the call.
Analysis
- In the absence of a recording of the call, we cannot substantiate what was said during it.
- While Mr X remains adamant he did not act as the Council says during the call, from our perspective, the injustice to Mr X from what has been claimed about him does not represent a level of injustice that would warrant our involvement.
- For these reasons, we will not investigate.
Final decision
- My decision is that the Ombudsman will not investigate this complaint. This is because he cannot change the outcome of it and the injustice to Mr X is not sufficient to warrant his involvement.
Investigator's decision on behalf of the Ombudsman