Summary: The Ombudsman will not investigate Mrs X’s complaint about the Council imposing restrictions on her contact with it. This has not caused her a significant direct personal injustice.

The complaint

1. The complainant, whom I shall call Mrs X, complains about the Council imposing restrictions on how she can contact it. She says this is unfair, means she has missed out on services and the Council has not complied with it.

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The Ombudsman’s role and powers

2. 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 fault has not caused injustice to the person who complained, or
• the injustice is not significant enough to justify the cost of our involvement. (Local Government Act 1974, section 24A(6), as amended)

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How I considered this complaint

3. I considered the information Mrs X provided with her complaint and the Council’s replies to her which it provided. I considered Mrs X’s comments on a draft version of this decision.

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What I found

Background

4. Mrs X has extensive contact with the Council’s children and education teams in order to access help and support for her child.
5. Mrs X says that in May 2019 the Council imposed a single point of contact (SPOC). This means it told her that it wanted her to contact only one officer. The Council say this was due to the unreasonable frequency and volume of her contact. Mrs X says it was unjustified.
6. In February 2020, the Council added to this SPOC. It said that it would from then on read and consider any further complaints from her, but it may not respond to them all if they were not significantly different from previous complaints. Mrs X says it has not, and has failed to reply to complaints which she believes are different issues.
7. In July 2020, the Council said it had to change the restrictions due to the burden and tone of Mrs X’s continued multiple contacts. It requested that she only wrote to each department once a week and kept the email short to no more than an A4 size. It said it would endeavour to reply each week. Mrs X says she struggles to keep her emails short. She says the Council has not replied each week and not on the days it said it would.
8. In November 2020, the Council said that as it was considering issuing court proceedings about her child’s care, and the Tribunal was considering the child’s education provision, it would not consider any new complaints about these issues until those proceedings had ended.
9. Mrs X says the SPOC and attached restrictions are unfair and unnecessary. She says it limits her ability to access services and has meant services have not been provided.

Analysis

10. The Council has provided us with its logs showing the extent of the contact and the responses it has made. Its logs run to 100s of pages.
11. The SPOC and other restrictions do not of themselves cause Mrs X any significant injustice. If the Council does not provide services which she or her child needs, then she can make a complaint about those service failures to us. The SPOC and contact restrictions are a way of managing her contacts within the Council’s resources, it does not mean it will not supply the services it has a duty to provide.
12. It is not a good use of public resources to investigate complaints about complaint procedures, if we are unable to deal with the substantive issue. So we do not usually consider complaints procedures operation in isolation.

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Final decision

13. The Ombudsman will not investigate this complaint. This is because there is no direct significant injustice caused by the Council imposing restrictions on her contact with it.

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Investigator's decision on behalf of the Ombudsman