In their Annual Report 2011/12 – Delivering public value published today, the Local Government Ombudsmen (LGO) illustrate how they have supported vulnerable citizens when they have made complaints about local services.

In one case a disabled man had to wait 18 months for a walk-in shower to be installed. The Ombudsman recommended that the council review its arrangements with registered social landlords for processing disabled facilities grants. (Page 36)

In another case, a child with learning difficulties missed a year of full-time education and nine months of support because two councils failed to work together to take appropriate and timely action to meet their needs. (Page 33)

The LGO enables the voice of citizens who have complained about local public services and need an independent and impartial investigation. Jurisdiction covers all local authorities in England, and all registered social care providers.

In 2001/12 the LGO decided 11,229 complaints and provided redress for over a quarter of cases – those where maladministration or service failure was found to have resulted in injustice.

Dr Jane Martin, Local Government Ombudsman and Chair of the Commission for Local Administration in England (the governing body for the LGO scheme), reflected on a year of challenge and change as the organisation prepared to transform its business model to deliver greater efficiency.

She acknowledged the need to go further and has signalled the intention to work together with other public sector ombudsman in England to ensure comprehensive access to citizens.

Dr Martin said: “The case studies highlighted in our annual report show that the Ombudsman can resolve complaints which affect the day-to-day experience of citizens – but many of the complaints should not have come to us in the first place and we are doing more to feed back lessons learned to councils and other bodies in jurisdiction to improve public administration and local public services.

“During the year, we progressed our plans to publish all our decision statements. This will help citizens make an informed choice of local public services and support improvement when things go wrong.”

The annual report is published at the same time as the Ombudsmen’s Annual Review Letters on every local authority in England. The annual review letters provide a summary of the complaints that the LGO received about each council. All reviews will be on the LGO website in the Councils’ Performance section.

Article date: 12 July 2012