LBWF repeatedly claims it is taking residents’ complaints seriously…but just as repeatedly fails to do so

In the last few years, LBWF has repeatedly claimed that it is taking residents’ complaints seriously, and learning from them, explaining:

‘Complaints are an important way for an organisation to be accountable to the public, as well as providing valuable insights into organisational performance and the conduct of staff providing services to residents in order to drive improvement in service delivery’.

Of course, many big corporates make similar noises, it’s become fashionable.

Yet in this particular case, there is reason to be circumspect, because LBWF rhetoric is one thing, reality sometimes quite another.  

This post takes a careful look at the evidence.

Like many local authorities, LBWF has a two-part complaints procedure, Stage 1, an investigation by the department complained about, and, if then escalated, Stage 2, a review by a complaints officer from elsewhere in the Town Hall, each of these having to be completed within specific deadlines (now 10 and 20 working days respectively, until recently, both 20 working days).

And the way that LBWF measures success or failure is speed of response, that is whether the stated deadlines are respected, with the relevant evidence presented in each succeeding Annual Governance Statement (AGS) (a somewhat obscure document, but that’s another subject entirely).

So how has LBWF performed?

The data presented in the 2023-24 AGS is indicative of a service that was in serious trouble, with the key paragraph reading:

‘The council is currently working through a significant backlog of both Stage 1 and Stage 2 complaints. As at 31 March 2024 there were 440 open Stage 1 complaints of which 244 were overdue. There were 53 open stage 2 complaints of which 33 were overdue’.

More positively, however, it appeared that LBWF had at least recognised its predicament and was trying to rectify matters.

Thus, the AGS reported, the corporate complaints team’s capacity was being boosted, and a project manager had been appointed ‘to help drive…turnaround times’.

Moreover, the Director of Governance and Law, Mark Hynes, was personally leading bi-weekly meetings of a Complaints Review Project Board, which had been specially created to measure progress against a new improvement plan.

Given all this activity, it might be assumed that the 2024-25 AGS would reveal improvement, but in fact it demonstrated only that not much had changed.

The headline finding, it’s true, seemed encouraging: across the council as a whole, 73 per cent of Stage 1 complaints had been resolved on time.

However, as the AGS conceded, this global figure hid the fact that outcomes between service areas varied considerably.

For example, only 13 per cent of complaints about adult social care and 30 per cent of complaints about childrens’ social care were answered on time, shocking given that these cases likely involved those in greatest need.

Moreover, the handling of Stage 2 complaints was described as ‘poor’, with around half of the total overdue.

As a whole, the AGS concluded, LBWF had failed to meet either ‘the standards set out by the Ombudsmen’ or ‘the customer service standards we expect for our residents’, an ‘underperformance’ which in turn had led to ‘dissatisfaction and potential reputational and financial risks’.

As to why this was happening, it was claimed that there had been an increase in the volume and complexity of cases.

But it was also admitted that many of the difficulties were self-inflicted, the result of factors such as ‘Resource and capability constraints’; ‘Inadequate case escalation procedures’; ‘Lack of review mechanisms’; ‘Poor communication between teams’; ‘Process inefficiencies’; and ‘inconsistent decision making’.

There followed, as the previous year, assurances that steps were being taken to improve performance, though some of these steps appeared alarmingly vague (for example, the projected introduction of ‘Monitoring and continuous improvement mechanisms to provide an ongoing assessment of complaint trends and the effectiveness of interventions’).  

In the 2023-24 AGS, LBWF had been forthright: ‘The council’s aim is to ensure that when things go wrong, it responds quickly to put things right’.

In reality, though, nothing like this actually happened.  A deeply flawed system remained a deeply flawed system.

Concurrently, LBWF has also been found wanting about a related matter. 

Residents who are dissatisfied with the way that LBWF handles their complaints in Stages 1 and 2 can take the final step and appeal to one or other of the Ombudsmen.

In the past couple of weeks, the Housing Ombudsman (HO) has reported on a subset of these kind of appeals, those brought forward by LBWF tenants in 2024-25.

It finds:

‘In the cases we reviewed, we saw insufficient compensation, delays in issuing complaints responses, and a dismissive tone in some letters. We also found delays in resolving repairs, particularly leaks. The landlord also showed difficulties in accessing its homes and incomplete or brief repair records’.

As a result, the HO requires that LBWF now follows a six point ‘Housing Complaints Improvement Plan’, and will monitor this through the rest of 2025-26.

Why LBWF has failed so miserably over complaints is not hard to fathom. 

Inadequate funding is certainly part of the problem. LBWF seems determined to run its complaints service on the cheap, and that in turn leads to staff burn-out and turnover.

But perhaps more important is the prevailing culture. For while LBWF periodically makes apparently enlightened promises, the truth is that over the past 20 years or so, it has been much influenced by two axioms – release as little information as is possible, and never admit mistakes – and these are of course fatal to an endeavor like learning from complaints.

Finally, that Mr. Hynes has been given such a major role in proceedings is not reassuring.

Needless to say, he has a lot of other business on his plate, but more importantly it’s also true that he has never seemed particularly sympathetic to residents’ concerns, as his unimpressive oversight of LBWF’s statutory duties under the Freedom of Information Act and long-time neglect of the Local Government Transparency Code demonstrates (see links, below).

As the saying goes, you can’t put new wine in old bottles.