Council CEO Jo Negrini’s three-month amnesty from having complaints submitted about her authority to the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman is over.
Croydon Council CEO Jo Negrini: subject again to Ombudsman scrutiny
The Ombudsman is pretty much the only recourse that remains to residents of the borough if they feel that their case is being ignored or badly handled by staff at Fisher’s Folly. Even then, its powers are strictly limited, the penalties at its disposal minimal, even for repeat offenders such as Croydon Council.
Councils are not even required to publish the detail of cases where the Ombudsman has found against them, allowing to continue the pretence that they are delivering services adequately. In Croydon, this has lead to instances where the same family has had to file repeat complaints after the council has continued to fail them.
The LGO considers submissions on disputes with local authorities over housing matters, planning issues, children and education and adult social care. In a system heavily loaded in favour of the local authorities – who use your Council Tax to pay to defend their actions – a complaint can only be submitted to the Ombudsman after the council has been allowed to “mark its own homework”. Twice.
Because of coronavirus, the Ombudsman paused all casework at the end of March, but today it announced that it “will be resuming all existing casework and taking on new complaints through its website from next week”.
“When we paused our casework in March, it was always a temporary measure in response to a national crisis,” the Ombudsman, Michael King, said today.
“We knew it came at a cost to people who rely on us to hold councils and care providers to account who have had their statutory rights temporarily denied.
“The time is now right for our full service to resume – not because the pandemic is over, but because that initial ‘fire-fighting’ crisis has abated. With this in mind, we will be re-opening to new complaints from Monday, June 29, and restarting those complaints we have previously been unable to pursue.
“I urge anyone who wants to make a new complaint to use our online complaint form, and reserve our helpline for those in most need of help accessing our online service. Like most organisations, we are adapting to working remotely, which is why our helpline will continue on reduced opening hours only. People who already have a complaint in the system should use the direct contact details of their named person.”
The LGO anticipates receiving complaints about events during the covid-19 crisis. They state that, “The law still requires people to have complained to their local council or care provider before they bring their complaint to the Ombudsman.”
Open for business: Ombudsman Michael King
And King adds: “Despite the time we have been closed to complaints, we can guarantee that nobody will be denied access to justice as we restart our casework.
“We fully expect, and are preparing for, complaints to come to us about peoples’ experiences of the covid-19 crisis. We will deal with any cases we receive with sensitivity, but we will have to consider the action we take within the wider context of any other public inquiries or investigations that take place.
“We know we have an important role to play on these major national questions. The need to give a voice to public experience has never been more important and we are one of the few genuinely independent bodies, with expertise in these areas, who can shine an impartial and dispassionate light upon recent events.”
The LGO’s complaints form page will not be available until next Monday.
For more information about the work of the Ombudsman and how to lodge a complaint, click here.
- If you have a news story about life in or around Croydon, or want to publicise your residents’ association or business, or if you have a local event to promote, please email us with full details at inside.croydon@btinternet.com
Inside Croydon is a member of the Independent Community News Network- Inside Croydon works together with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and BBC London News
- Inside Croydon named Journalist of the Year at 2018 Anna Kennedy Online Autism Heroes Awards
- ROTTEN BOROUGHS AWARDS: For three consecutive years, 2017, 2018 and 2019, Inside Croydon has been the source for award-winning nominations in Private Eye magazine’s annual celebration of civic cock-ups
- Inside Croydon had 1.6million pages viewed by 721,000 unique visitors in 2019
One suspects that the massive amount of money paid out for ‘legal advice’ is all the evidence needed of the dire state of Croydon Council and the volume of complaints against it!