Huge rise in moans over Shropshire Council’s work
Complaints against Shropshire Council have increased by more than 20 per cent in the past 12 months, new figures show.
Complaints against Shropshire Council have increased by more than 20 per cent in the past 12 months, new figures show.
The authority has also failed to meet targets when responding to written inquiries, according to the Local Government Ombudsman. Council bosses, however, today said they expected the increase as they have been ‘actively encouraging’ people to raise complaints with the LGO.
But they also admitted to having made a ‘conscious decision’ to focus on other issues and not to make answering the complaints a priority.
According to the Local Government Ombudsman, the council took an average of 34.6 days to respond to first written inquiries – outside a target period of 28 days. It also reveals that a total of 110 complaints were received about the council in 2011/12 compared to 91 in the previous 12 months – a rise of 21 per cent.
Dr Jane Martin, local government ombudsman, said in a letter to council chiefs: “I understand that staffing shortages were likely to affect response times and I note that generally the council has requested extensions, which is helpful.
“But my staff have noticed the time taken to respond to further inquiries has also been increasing. I would be grateful if the council could make efforts to improve in this area.”
Claire Porter, Shropshire Council’s corporate head of legal and democratic services, said: “We would expect the number of complaints to have increased in the last 12 months as we have actively encouraged people to make complaints to the ombudsman.
“We want people to be aware of the ways they can raise issues and hold us to account. However, of these, there were no findings of maladministration against the council.
“The slight increase in response times has not been caused by staff shortages, as suggested in the review, but is due to a conscious decision to prioritise our time dealing with supporting front-line services rather than trying to meet the ombudsman’s deadlines.”
Comments for: "Huge rise in moans over Shropshire Council’s work"
But
Shropshore councils cuts aren't affecting its service to end users ...... Discuss
Jelly
Keith Barrow says it's really important to listen to local people - these figures suggest that local people are ignored
Mark
“The slight increase in response times has not been caused by staff shortages, as suggested in the review, but is due to a conscious decision to prioritise our time dealing with supporting front-line services rather than trying to meet the ombudsman’s deadlines.”
Rubbish! Whilst I don't work for one of our local councils, I do work for another county council. Any attempt to disguise the fact that staff shortgages lead to increased response times is talking nonsense. I see it daily and it matters not whether it's a public sector organisation or private sector, the result is the same.
Try pulling the other one.
Roger
I assume that the Ombudsman would not have been involved if SCC had dealt with complaint properly in the first place. A referal buy the ombudsman should be easily dealt with as the facts would have been previously considered in the origional complaint. So by return would be appropriate unless of course the complainant had been fobbed off in a way that the Ombudsman will not accept.
green guru
May have something to do with the lack of cardboard collections?
gary
not that any of these "efficiency" cuts to "back office" jobs makes any difference then?? This is a myth made up by the Coalition that there is heaps of slack in the system, now we are seeing NHS waiting times rise and things like this. Its easy to save money by doing less work and having less staff, the skill is being genuinely efficient.
Roger
Efficiency is doing more for less. The tory concept is doing less with less and labour doing more with more. We simple peole do not understand that, if the staff wages have been frozen or cut for years, front line services need to be cut at all.
Of course there is no payfreeze on the outsourced services they just increase in cost every year. SCC has no control on contract cost until they expire in twenty years, very bad management.
dave
further evidence to show unitary council has been a failure for shropshire
Roger
Odd isn't it. Niether the town council or the county council were that bad before the unitary council was formed. Now it looks like a tory meglamaniac becoming a dictator driving staff moral and services down to satisfy some dreadful concepts of privatisation which will enslave us to the contracts for decades to come. I just don't understand where it all came from.
Can we have a vote to return to the old arrangements? Or is this a one way street to the cliff edge.
aaron hunt
probably due to the arrogant bullying brash elected members who forget that we pay their wages and think they call the shots. time for an election to remind them all who is the boss.
pd
this is what happens when you privatise all the proper services the council runs based on the cheapest provider, ringway dont spray the weeds anymore, veolia dont collect cardboard or batteries or clothing any more, public toilets have been given over to town councils leading to massive rises in council tax for local people and swimming pools now run by serco hike their prices and fail to invest the money which was set aside for a new pool in the town and as for the fiasco with that traffic island in the middle of the main town bypass well no doubt this was the fault of the privatised enterprise. Now the council wants to privatise more services! Are they mad? i blame the politicians at shirehall who are like religious zealots and dont take proper decisions on facts and figures but are blinded by a outdated and failed rightwing thatcherite dogma
shropshire council has been a disaster for shrewsbury, bring back the old sabc i say!
Wile Coyote
Serco have either retained or lowered prices, and the money 'set aside' for a new pool disappeared a long time ago...
Roger
PD
Shame on you
You stole my words practically verbatum.
liverbird
Proof if indeed it were needed that the Council is run badly. Those elections cannot come soon enough both locally and nationally the Conservatives are just not working and have to go. Vote them out!
charles
Hmmmmmmmmm. Funny that, less staff means less work gets done. That is simply basic mathematics...
Roger
More like; less wages mean less dedication and more despair. Efficiency is about doing more with less not cutting wages and services.
Wenlock Un
"a conscious decision to prioritise our time dealing with supporting front-line services rather than trying to meet the ombudsman’s deadlines."
What a poor management response. If you claim to have adequate resource capacity to fulfil your obligations, then this should still result in all targets being met. Prioritising merely affects the order in which they are achieved.
oliver
This coincides with the period during which they stopped recycling our cardboard due to the toxic ink scare. I would wager that explains the majority of these extra complaints on its own a most people I know are incredibly peeved by this decision. After all we pay nearly £2,000 every year for this service and yet they merely provide skips for us to take things to and expect us to do all the work sorting it and burn our petrol to do their collections for them. Its simply not good enough. In the real world they would go bankrupt because we would simply take our custom elsewhere.
Wenlock Un
oliver,
The service is now in your 'real world', and Veolia are saying there's no margin, so no collection service. 2k pays for your skips and their required margin. Today's real world, no-one does anything for nothing!
Meanwhile, in I guess what must be the unreal world, the Council could in theory have continued the collection, absorbed the ink issue internally, resulting in increased costs and ultimately higher Council tax, then you'd have been happy?
mary f
You can hire a skip for £99, so veolia must be making one hell of a margin to justify £2,000 per household!
Wenlock Un
Mary,
We don't know what Veolia's full costs are, but that's really my point, they're a 'real world' business, that will always put margin before performance and yet lots of people seem to want their Council to become like this.
Roger
The skips have been there for years, long before Veolia and presumibly the cardboard was recycled at a profit. There is no new cost just saving from not doing street collections and I would be happy with a council tax cut to reflect that.
Tesco recycle all there cardboard to the benefit of Tescos and their packaging supplier, it is not a on cost.
The real world is that if you give someone a long term contract they will manage the client's expection down whilst increasing charges and profits. We all pay for the politicians mistakes.
jimmy choos
Well actually as a taxpayer i am glad they arent spending heaps employing people to write complaints letters and interact with government beaurocrats!
the priority instead should be frontline services which people actually use! Bins, libraries, schools, parks, roads etc.
Wenlock Un
Jimmy,
I think the point being that you employ enough people to deliver the services so that you don't have the complaints in the first place.
Ray
Well said wenlock un
the best thing is to get it right first time, no complaints = no admin costs for complaints. 1st = LISTEN to the people first and do what they want as they pay your wages after all. 2nd then do things thoroughly, professionally not rushed and on the cheap all the time
Ray
that said the people of shropshire do seem to be a right bunch of moaners!
mary f
It takes ages to get through on the phone there, i wonder if this is a deliberate ploy to reduce the complaints?
Salopian
Shame moaning and constantly being negative isn't an Olympic event,Shropshire would be gold,gold,gold!!!
Roger
If the olympics had been organised by the Tory lead SCC we wuld have severe competition for that medal.
oh no not the council!!
would be interesting to see
A) How many of these complaints were relevant to the council and not sent in error thinking something was the council responsibility (very common, I assure you)
B) How many complaints that passed the above were upheld.
Just because they're classed as complaints doesn't mean they were not possibly wasting the council's time...
Roger
That's the second line defence.
If it is wrong it wasn't me it was central government's fault.
Very few people complain unless they have something to complaint about. If the problem stems from misunderstanding then the first respose should explain the situation. The Ombudsman gets invoved when the response was not satifactory. If the complaint was not proper the Ombudsman would have rejected it.
eva land
When we pointed out that the Ombudsman advisor told us we had a valid complaint we were not encouraged to complain, quite the opposite.
We did not do so but are still within the time allowed to do so.
All we want is to be treated fairly, justly and impartially and not subject to the manipulation of local councillor interests.
That the Standards Board for England has been abolished by the Localism Bill is a gift to out of control, overpaid elected councillors and makes it very difficult for many of the professional workforce who are actually employed by Shropshire Council.
[B) How many complaints that passed the above were upheld.
Just because they’re classed as complaints doesn’t mean they were not possibly wasting the council’s time…]
To not be able to get through on the telephone or not receive a reply for weeks is not an acceptable service that we the taxpayer pay for.
[, but is due to a conscious decision to prioritise our time dealing with supporting front-line services rather than trying to meet the ombudsman’s deadlines.”]
The pompous management speak is a disgrace.
julian
Losing so many jobs and creating a working environment that gives surviving staff no motivation to work hard is guaranteed to have a negative effect on front line services.
Are the management incompetent, or is it two fingers up to the rest of us because they know that they are untouchable? Suggesting that the rise in complaints is because they asked for them, points to a third option - delusion!
David
"Too many chiefs, not enough Indians" springs to mind when I think of our beloved Council!!
Kath
So the council actively encourages people to complain, then decides not to prioritise dealing with complaints?
Sounds like pretty contemptuous treatment of people with "issues" to me.
It also sounds like a typical council consultation exercise. 'Do please tell us what you think. We won't take a blind bit of notice, but at least we're asking. Tick!"
Rob, Telford
"consult": verb, used by organisations, esp. central and local government. A portmanteau word combining "con" and "insult".
See also: "focus group", "fact finding" and "representative democracy".
AL
personally i cannot be bothered to formally complain but i suspect im fairly similar to like the silent majority who think the council services are very poor but just get on with life and dont complain
dazza
Perhaps its just that people in Shropshire are even more moany than the average winging Pom?
Soggy Sue
Personally, I have not experienced any deterioation in service from the Council. I have always found Shirehall staff thoroughly rude and totally disinterested in anything the public have to say (complaint or not)and that assumes that anybody bothers to answer the telephone in the first instance!
paul digweed
just over 100 complaints in a year is nothing there are probably branches in a bank which get that many in a day, typical of the anti council star to blow this story out of all proportion and the trolls on here to put the boot in
the council has just had its funding cut by 25% by eric pickles and the coalition,they protected foreign aid and bloated central government sections yet they are cutting frontline efficient services like bin collections and highway maintenence in local communities
this is a government which has got its priorities wrong and a council which is coping admirably with cutbacks which will inevitably reduce services and cause some complaints in the process
Roger
Pickles has cut housing benefits by 25% and left it to the councils to decide how to apply the cuts. In this way any cut made is blamed on the council. The rents are also going up so the courts had better get ready for a large increase in eviction orders from housing associations and private landlords. I hope that the homelessness unit and childrens services are ready to deal with the result. Austerity for the poor resulting in central government saving at vastly increased local government cost increasing total spending and deficit growth.
Mark
True enough Roger. I fear housing benefit tenants, local authorities and the Department for Work and Pensions really are not prepared for the storm that is fast approaching.
And whilst this is all looming on the horizon, greedy private landlords continue to push up their rents to ridiculous levels, encouraged by the poorly conceived Local Housing Allowance scheme.
Be very afraid.
blue boy
32 days to reply to a letter! No doubt they were all making tea all day at Shirehall, typical lazy public sector workers, they should be sacked for such laziness this is why we need to bring more private sector expertise in to run public services because they have a customer focus and are more efficient for our hard earned taxes. This is the legacy of years of Labour creating non-jobs at the Council