 Good morning and welcome to the 11th meeting of the local government housing and planning committee in 2022. I would ask all members and witnesses to ensure their mobile phones are on silent and that all other notifications are turned off during the meeting. We have received apologies for today's meeting from Mark Griffin and Willie Coffey is joining us remotely. The first item on our agenda is to decide whether to take items 3 and 5 in private and whether to consider draft reports on the non-domestic rates coronavirus Scotland Bill and the coronavirus recovery and reform Scotland Bill in private at our next meeting. Are we all agreed? We're agreed. We're now turned to item 2, which is to take evidence on the Scottish Public Service Ombudsman's annual report for 2020-21. We're joined for this session by Rosemary Agnew, who is our ombudsman, Nicky McLean, who is the director of the SPSO and Andrew Sheridan, who is the head of improvement standards and engagement. I welcome our witnesses to the meeting. Members have received copies of the annual report, along with an update on work that has taken place since the period covered by the report. I intend to allow around an hour for this session, although we have some room for flexibility if we need to overrun. I will now open the session for questions. I would like to begin by asking the first question. I'm interested to learn clearly in the reports and updates that we've been hearing about the impact of Covid. I'd be interested in hearing how Covid-19 has impacted the number and type of complaints dealt with by the ombudsman, and whether there have been any significant changes as a result of so many public services going online. I think that the impacts have actually been twofold in terms of complaints. It's more what we haven't seen that we were expecting or might have been expecting. We haven't, as yet, seen a big increase in complaints about things like access to GP services or access to elective surgery that's been delayed. What we found over the two periods of lockdown—although we've essentially been in lockdown continuously—there were two very distinct periods. We found that, in the first period, the number of complaints did drop significantly. The sort of anecdotal feedback that we were having from people was that we don't want to bother the NHS, we don't want to bother public services, and I think that people were adapting to life differently in lockdown. In terms of the breakdown of complaints, the numbers had reduced in the first year, if you like. In this second year of lockdown, the numbers have gradually gone back up now and are probably just about at pre-pandemic levels, but the proportions of the complaints have not changed significantly. For example, health complaints have remained at around about 40 per cent all the way through. The other impact in terms of public service is in relation to complaint handling. We have differed from at least one other ombudsman in the UK in that we have not stopped taking complaints. We did not stop taking health complaints, and it was a conscious decision because we felt that more than ever citizens needed a way of giving feedback. What we also did was we continued monitoring, so things like reports came to us occasionally from such and such as put up on their website. They are not handling complaints because of the pandemic, so we followed those up, made sure that people were handling. We have had to balance that with two different approaches in terms of public bodies themselves. For Andrew's team, for example, we have been giving advice, we have been helping support in terms of model complaints handling, prompting people, public bodies—you still have to comply with that—but recognising that, for a lot of public bodies, they were moving complaints handlers into front-line services or they were off themselves with Covid. It is really about giving advice, about keeping people informed, communicating with them. Certainly in the last year, Andrew's team has been working with NHS boards to look at some form of triaging to make sure that the cases with the most clinical need are identified early on. In terms of our investigative resources, it had a big impact on us, certainly the first lockdown, partly because of people being off themselves, partly because of homeschooling, caring duties and simply adapting us adapting to getting everybody up on technology platforms. Everybody came online and we have the ability to work remotely. In the investigation teams, in Nicky's teams, what we found is that it has impacted in two ways. It is our capacity to keep complaints moving. We have kept them moving but there have been delays. The other is that some of those delays are not caused by our capacity. It is the capacity of public bodies to respond to us, to respond to complaints themselves. We have tried to balance following things up with being realistic about what public bodies are able to do. On balance, we have probably got it about right. Some are happy with what we have done, others are unhappy with what we are doing, but I would say that it has affected our timescales because investigations have taken us longer. I do not know if you want to add anything. In terms of the number of Covid-related cases, for example at the moment out of the 1,300 cases we have on desk, we have around 75 Covid-related cases so that you can get a scale of what we are dealing with. We have markers for those in two ways. It is directly Covid or indirect Covid, so direct Covid would be, for example, complaints about hospital to care or care to hospital, those sorts of things. Thank you for that. It is great to hear that you have that determination to keep your doors open and support other organisations to keep their doors open too in complaint handling and allow, as you say, people to give feedback to the services being offered. Continuing on the thread around Covid-19 again, I am keen to hear whether the cases that you received are becoming more complex and whether the office has adequate resource and expertise to fill its role. There are a number of questions in there. Before lockdown we were making changes to the way that we look at complaints. Under our act there is a formal point at which something is said to be an investigation. We have to do specific things like serve notice before we start an investigation, but a lot of our cases we find what we do are inquiries, pre-investigation, if you like. Over the years we have seen a marked improvement in the way public bodies handle complaints. I know it might seem like we issue some very critical reports every now and again, but if you bear in mind that we see only a tiny proportion of all the complaints that are made, what we recognised over time was that a lot of the time the public body has done a reasonable investigation and they have done all the things that model complaints handling is asking of them. They have identified poor practice, good practice, put in place measures, redress and what have you. We are finding increasingly that we couldn't achieve more for many people because everything has been achieved at those first two stages. We made a deliberate move to not accept those for this full detailed investigation. What that means is that the complaints that are left that go through this very detailed investigation are inherently more complex, particularly some of the health complaints that are over half of our investigations now. They often require two, sometimes three pieces of clinical advice, but I'd also say that it's not just the complaints that are more complex. I would say the context of them, the challenges that the complainers bring with them, their own vulnerability is also quite complex on these more detailed investigations. What we're trying to do is give ourselves the space to be able to do those empathetically, thoroughly. At the same time, and this is not again linked to lockdown, we were doing this anyway, we've started taking much more of a resolutions approach. So, if when we get something in, we can see a way of resolving it without investigating it, then those are the ones that we are treating slightly differently now. So, for example, some housing complaints where it's about repairs, they lend themselves to simply picking up the phone and saying, what would solve this for you? Going to the public body, this would solve it. So, increasingly we're taking that approach. We've also issued guidance for ourselves which we've issued to public bodies about trying to take this approach. Now, what that means is the way we use our investigative capacity is changing as well. So, we do fewer of the very detailed investigations, but there are slightly different skills needed for some of this early resolution work. So, we're investing in training our own teams in resolutions-based approaches. We're also developing capacity in things like neurodiversity. We spent a lot of time for ourselves looking at wellbeing. It was critical during lockdown, still is. And what we're also trying to do irrespective of lockdown is have a more structured approach to training our managers. So, I would say what we're offering is a lot more holistic than it was two years ago. Now, lockdown has had its challenges capacity-wise, not simply because of the number of people available at any one time, but also in relation to how we operate. And I think it's easy to focus on the negative, but actually there have been some very positive things because we've moved to electronic working. We will be moving to more hybrid working when we go back to the office properly later this year. Where the biggest challenge, though, has come is we went into lockdown with a backlog of cases that were unallocated. And those came about because of increase in complaint numbers, because we made some changes to our own investigative approach. We've had the impact of sickness, as well as other Covid lockdown-related things. And we went into lockdown, pre-lockdown, with a plan, and we were on track and then lockdown hit us. And what we found was that that pool of unallocated cases has, well, it had grown, but as of yesterday, I think it was roundabout where it was pre-lockdown. The difference is some cases are sitting unallocated for many more months than before lockdown. Now, the corporate body have been very supportive. They have made resources available to us for extra staff. And we've been recruiting those extra staff now for months. There have been some significant changes in the labour market, I would say. But we've hopefully, fingers crossed, we've made a number of offers and we have staff who will be starting with us soon. Now, irrespective of those staff starting, basically when we look at our productivity over the last two years, it's probably on average about 15% lower than pre-lockdown. But it is now picked up. And we are making very significant inroads into our oldest cases. And we won't finish the end of the year in too bad a position, given everything going on. I won't say it's ideal because it's not. There are still too many people who are waiting for too long to have their complaints looked at. Now, I should caveat that with every complaint that comes in is looked at and triaged. So where there is something that maybe has urgency because of the subject matter, or because of the vulnerability of the individual, or it's something we can resolve quickly. We're not putting those into our unallocated pool of cases. We're trying to progress those straight away. So not everybody is waiting all that time, but it's very much based on urgency and need. As I say, it's not ideal, and I can't say I'm happy about it. But I think the team around me have worked really hard. I say this every time I appear, but I mean it every time. I'm really proud of what they've achieved during lockdown because they've kept the office going, the managers have got their teams going, we've still had contact, we've looked after each other, and the complainers coming to us. So we do get complaints about our service, but we get some fantastic positive comments as well. So capacity-wise, we lost quite a lot of capacity in the first year because of the actual impact of moving to remote working. And then, over the year, we've lost capacity because of staff turnover and sickness. Fingers crossed, we're back on track for the coming year. Thank you very much for that, Rosemary. We will pick up on some of the points that you made, but I just wanted to note that I'm heartened to hear that you say that you've given... So there's a kind of change in working practices, acknowledging that there's a need to handle cases with empathy, and that that needs what you said, space. But I think that's absolutely right. When people are coming into an environment where they're complaining, often it is that they really need a great deal of empathy. And so I think it seems to me that you're bringing that in more to your work, but also bringing the resolutions approach so that you can... You've got ease there by sorting out some of the complaints more speedily, but then being able to give empathy to the things that are maybe more complex. And I just really appreciate that that's that way of working. And I'd like to bring in Graham Day with a number of questions. Yeah, thank you. Good morning. Before I get into the thrust of my questions, can I just be absolutely clear on something? You're rolling investigating complaints. Are you reinvestigating the original complaint if it comes to you, or are you simply looking at the processes that were followed by the body in question to ensure that those were as they should have been? A bit of both, actually. Some of the very early closures of complaints, we will be looking at the way something was handled by the public body. And we ask ourselves a number of questions. It's not just enough to do what you should have done. We also look at other things like, was there learning from complaints? Was it handled well? Was there good practice from it? And we may make inquiries about some aspect of something just to confirm that they are doing what they said they do. We follow that through. We don't just take everything on face value. Where it becomes more investigating some of the underlying issues is if we get into more detailed investigations because we don't think that the outcome that was achieved necessarily reflects what we might be able to achieve or what should have happened. So some of it is judgment, some of it is experience, but even with those cases that are closed early doors, there is a right of review within our own organisation. So if somebody comes back to us and says, actually I've got some more information now that I didn't send you before, we'll look at it again. So it's not a complete closed door. OK, thanks. I should preface the questions that we're going to ask by acknowledging that we absolutely get the impact that Covid has had on all sorts of organisations. And of course the fact is that a number of complaints aren't legitimate in nature at the outset, that's inevitably the case. But all of that said, you said earlier on that the corporate body has been very supportive of yourselves and you in turn have been supportive and looking to be understanding of the challenges that the public bodies have faced. But all of that said, ultimately you're there to represent the rights of the public, to have a right of challenge to the experiences they've had. And we read that there's currently a delay of up to 11 months in allocating complaints to a complaints reviewer. And that inevitably is going to have an off-putting effect on members of the public if they read that. What is the point of taking this complaint forward? It's going to be up to 11 months. I'm wondering in the first instance what evidence anecdotally or otherwise you have of people not pursuing a complaint that they might have because of this inordinate delay. And it's an inordinate delay that comes in top almost inevitably of a delay they've experienced with the public body itself. Because I certainly have cases where the response from the NHS has been one of, well, I'm sorry, we don't have time to deal with it, and I understand that. But put together, people who try to raise a complaint, often legitimate complaints, face a very long time before getting the resolution they're looking for are entitled to. I'm interested in exploring with you that aspect, but also how this 11-month delay compares to where you were pre-pandemic. What would the experience of people being pre-pandemic? And also, on average, after it's allocated to a complaint reviewer, whether it proceeds to the full investigation or not, how long does it take on average to conclude that? I'll answer part of it, and I'll probably ask Nicky to answer part of it as well. Compared to pre-pandemic, the 11 months as of yesterday was 10 months, which is encouraging. But pre-pandemic, it was around about three months, and that was three to four months, and that was reducing. I would say that in terms of the anecdotal evidence, that's a really interesting question, because one of the bigger challenges I think for us has been stakeholder engagement. I've heard not expressed in that way, but certainly groups like PASS, patient advisory services, through their inquiries to us, we need to get things moving, can you get things moving. Before it even comes to us, we found early in lockdown we had a big increase in the number of inquiries where people were trying to get answers at first stage, at local level. I've not heard anything specific about people not bringing their complaints to us. It wouldn't surprise me if somebody said that. I think we've tended to be more the opposite. We've said to people when other MSPs write to us or other advocacy services, citizens advice, we are saying please signpost people to us, because the urgent things will get picked up and looked at. I say I'm not happy that that has been the position, but in terms of how they're progressing, I'm going to ask Nicky if she'd like to have a look at this bit, just to give my voice a bit for rest. Just picking up the point about anecdotally, so I think we know through our assessment and guidance team, people's responses to that are actually quite mixed. Some people say that's absolutely fine. The priority is to get the complaint looked at, happy to wait, and obviously for other people, as you say, we recognise and appreciate that can cause additional stress. We know the longer that people sit within that complaint period, it can be very incredibly stressful for people, but that is why we have the priority criteria, so we can try to help those people that are most vulnerable, so that they're not sitting in that position. As Rosemary has already alluded to, we do look for opportunities by putting cases through triage and look for opportunities for resolution. The resolution isn't just on the non-complex cases now, because we have a system having standard complaints across Scotland. I wouldn't say there are many cases now that you open up and you think that that's a non-complex case, so resolution, although we think of that as a quick fix, actually these cases are still incredibly complicated. In terms of case age, we have definitely seen the average case age rise significantly over this period of time. Prior to lockdown, it was very rare that we would have cases go over two years. The majority of cases would be closed in that 260-day target that we set ourselves. There are cases now that are our oldest cases, two and a half years old, and there are a batch of cases because they're not being allocated for 11 months that are sitting between that one and two year mark. Our goal this year is very much to focus down on bringing those waiting times within the allocation pool down so that our investigative staff can start turning these cases around and we can get back to that 260-day target, which was achievable pre-lockdown. You're at 10 months now, you were saying, so if someone came along today with a case that was deemed non-urgent, accepted as being such, how long currently do you think they would be in total before their case was dealt with? Even non-urgent, it would depend on what it was if you're talking about beginning to end. It could be that, even though it was non-urgent, it was one that we could resolve, so it might get looked at within a couple of months, two or three months. If it's at in the pool of unallocated cases, then if we continue with the progress that we're currently making, I would predict that it would be about six to seven months before it gets passed to an investigator, a complaints reviewer, and at that point the length of time it takes would be very dependent on what the subject matter is. Can we look at some specific public bodies? Local authorities, for example, because we are, of course, the local government committee. I'm interested to explore with you briefly the volumes and the nature of local authority complaints. Are they changing in any way? Do you see any variances from the pandemic? Are your dealings with local authorities fairly consistent? You were talking about your ability to go on and resolve things with a telephone call sometimes, or are there some local authorities that are far better at that kind of engagement with yourselves and others? I think it's difficult to say there are local authorities who are poor at engagement with us. Different organisations have different challenges at different times, and even within a local authority you can have a superb relationship with the complaints department and find that it's very difficult with another department. I don't think that there is a uniform. I don't detect that we have specifically difficult relationships with the most organisations or as people. Where I think some of the difficulty has come has been their allocation of resources, our allocation of resources, actually trying to get to that. I don't detect from the cases I've seen any reluctance or change in wanting to resolve things. If anything, I would say our own development of resolution is something that particularly the local authority network. We meet with the chairs of the complaint handlers from different sectors and Andrew's team are in contact with the network of complaint handlers for local authorities. I think where there's probably been the most misgiving is in relation to we've just republished within the model complaints handling some revised performance indicators. We've been clear all the way through that it may not be at the top of everybody's list, but complaints are really important. In terms of the subject matters, Nicky may be able to pick up on this, but I haven't detected anything significantly different. With the exception of some areas that are getting more complex, I think are in relation to social care and the interaction between health and social care, so where you've got local authority, NHS board and health and social care partnerships. Subject matter, I'm not sure that there has been that much of a change. It's more about the speed with which things are going through. I don't know if you wanted to add anything to that. I was just going to add about the engagement side to my team. Actually, we're doing it this week. We meet with specifically local authority complaint handlers and there's a real positive relationship there. Although they are stressed and they are stretched, we've continued to encourage them to sign posters, as Rosemary said, but again we've taken on feedback from them through the pandemic to say, okay, we realise that things are maybe a little bit difficult. How can we help you to make things better for people that are coming to complain? That's why we've refreshed those performance indicators, is to make them really focus on getting through them in a timely fashion. My team certainly supported them with that and we point them towards good practice or have you tried this? The resolution work that Rosemary spoke about, we delivered a session so that we're all using the same language so that members of the public know that the language they'll get from local authorities will be exactly the same as they get when they come to us. I guess the most exorcised and agitated of complainants who come to you will often hold a view that there's something wrong with the system where the body they've complained against continues to investigate itself up to that point at various levels of escalation. But what you said earlier, Commissioner, you feel that the system is actually improving in terms of its performance? I think complaints handling is. It's an interesting, the organisation that I am complaining about is investigating itself. When model complaints handling first came in, the idea of the very early stages trying to resolve it quickly, which I say has not been happening because of lockdown, often the thing being complained about is something that you can just fix. So it makes sense that it is the person, look, I'm not happy with what you've done, can you fix it? Now, in terms of the investigation, a more detailed investigation, while it's the same organisation, there are a number of underlying aims with this. Obviously the complainer, it's about trying to get a complaint looked at. And I know we've focused on our relationship with the public bodies, but that is not in favour of complainers. If we can get them to deliver it better, it is for complainers benefit. Now, it's not necessarily the same person who's delivered a service that was investigated. It might be the same area of service. But fundamental to this is learning, learning and improvement, and the best learning and improvement happens at the local level, where you look at it for yourself, you make changes yourself. The quickest redress comes at the local level, and that is good practice and that is to complainers benefit as well. I would say the other thing is that what it gives complainers is a right to a third route, if you like, by coming to us if they remain dissatisfied. And I think the fact that we only see such a small number is an indication that generally it works well. Having said that, we do have the powers to look at complaint handling as well. If you look at a couple of the public reports last year, they were specifically about complaint handling. So we will pick up on complaint handling, whether we identify it during an investigation or identify it through another route. I can understand why people might feel, isn't this Turkey's voting for Christmas type thing? But I would say that the strength of the oversight function mitigates against that. The other thing with model complaints handling as well is that the standards and the processes are not just about how to investigate complaints. It's also about governance and the corporate responsibility for monitoring complaints, ensuring that there's learning from complaints and monitoring complaint numbers. So we would expect boards or councils to actually have sight of that type of information as well. I think that as a complete package it works. The fact that other ombudsmen around the UK, other jurisdictions, have now followed suit in that, I think highlights that ultimately it's trying to get the best outcome for the complainer at the soonest point and ideally about learning from that so it doesn't happen to somebody else. Okay, thank you. I've got one final question, convener, if I may, which is around your interaction with the Scottish Housing Regulator. You also have a memorandum of understanding. So how in practice do you share any insights into complaints about social landlords with the regulator? How does that work? Part of it is through our housing network, which I'll ask Andrew to comment on in a minute. We don't get a huge number of housing complaints in comparison to all our complaints, but what we do with all our complaints is we monitor our own intelligence from them, if you like. And if we found that there was any form of trend or any significant issue, then we would be likely to share that with the housing regulator or any other regulator. Obviously it has to be at an anonymous level in terms of the actual information, but this I think is about us looking for themes and trends. We also have or attend the housing network, which is complaint handlers from the housing, the RSLs themselves and so share good practice. They're pretty locked down with quite a dynamic group. Andrew, they're reconvening now, aren't they? Again, it's much like the local authority, where one of the officers from my team go to those meetings on a regular basis. There's a lot of data about what we're trying to move to, what has been a bit more data savvy when we see it, so that we can identify, as Rosemary said, if there are any themes or trends and then we make recommendations and then we say, this is how we can support you with this or we can direct you to something. It's certainly one of the networks that's been a bit fluctuating in terms of people being available to sit in them, but we've got to refocus on it now, as with many of them, and over the next year in our business plan it is about more engagement and how we can essentially move from supporting these meetings to sharing information. And then, like I said, it's important for my team is sharing that learning and improvement, and then hopefully that filters down, so we're supporting this resolution model at all stages. I'd say one of the areas where RSLs do struggle. As did local authorities for housing before them, which is with anti-social behaviour type complaints, because they're very often difficult to resolve. They're very often cases where you can't tell one party what's happening with another party, and I think those are other ones where what we would be encouraging is certainly good communication, and for ourselves they can be quite difficult as well, because we can't always explain exactly why we come to a conclusion we have. Thank you. We're now going to move on to questions from Miles Briggs. Thank you, convener. Good morning to the panel. Thank you for joining us. I'm not sure if my microphone's on or not. It is. Sorry. I wanted to ask a question with regard to the previous ombudsman who told the last local government committee that some public bodies felt ignored PSOs' recommendations or delayed in responding. I just wondered if you felt that was still the case. No. We certainly don't ignore recommendations or we don't find our recommendations are ignored. I think what you've hit on is it's been a debate for as long as I've been in this arena, which is should an ombudsman have binding powers to enforce what they find? My personal view on that is the recommendation route is a better route in terms of outcomes. So we make recommendations in three different ways. There are recommendations that are about specific redress for individuals, which might for example include apologies. Over half of our recommendations are about learning and improvement and then some are about complaint handling. They all get logged and they all get followed up and certainly in my time there has never been a recommendation that has not been complied with and I believe in my predecessors both of them the same was true. I've come close to a couple of times to say if you don't comply soon I am going to look at reporting it to Parliament and it's in terms of influence quite a powerful thing because no public body really wants to be the first I don't think. Having said that, when we make our recommendations our findings are ours. The outcomes that we are seeking are what we think are appropriate. What we have tried to do over the last three or four years in particular is be more flexible in terms of how public bodies can demonstrate that they have achieved the outcome we're looking for. I don't mean they dictate. I mean if we say we would like you to demonstrate that everybody presenting at A&E gets the appropriate scan at the appropriate time and we give suggestions of we think we'd like to see this, this and this. If a public body came back to us and said actually I can demonstrate that much more effectively in a different way we're open to that sort of discussion. Where I would say we've had the impact of Covid is it's been much more difficult to follow up recommendations and it's been much more difficult for public bodies to implement them but that doesn't mean they're lost in the system. We have a support and intervention policy and we will follow and check that they have been complied with. That's very helpful, thank you, because I think for most of us when we hear public bodies saying lessons will be learned it's only till the next scandal or the next issue so it's where those recommendations are followed up or often really important. Do you think over the last two years then that work hasn't been able to take place because of Covid? I wouldn't say it hasn't taken place, I'd say it's taken place. In some instances more slowly there have been other examples where it has been very, very quickly done. An obvious example was the public report about audiology services. Once those recommendations were made and that increasingly we are asking public bodies to have audits done by expert bodies and once that audit was done the public body, the board concerned, reacted very, very quickly. I would say that some of the more systemic things are probably more difficult for public bodies and some of the health outcomes are probably going to be more difficult. But what the recommendations highlight and why it's important to do them and to follow them through is that some of these recommendations are not just about can you change a process somewhere, they're about fundamental changes to approaches not just to complaints to other aspects of service. I don't think they happen as quickly as I would like them to now but I don't think that that is for want of trying. There will be the occasional public body that will ask for a review of a decision because they don't agree with that but once we have made the recommendation we will follow it through in that way. I can't give you a specific example of something that I think has delayed specifically because of not wanting to do it or delay. I would say the other challenge for the recommendations and this is not just about our recommendations. I think this is about learning and improvement in the widest sense. It is going to be changes in staff turnover and the number of people who are leaving public service or who are moving around public service and losing some of that corporate memory. I think she's been doing these sort of jobs for as long as I have. Sometimes they just seem to come around again years and years later and you think we try to get learning and improvement but the world moves and people move. I'm speculating now but I'm speculating from the point of experience that I think the challenge will be the experience, knowledge and skills that are retained in the future that will make some of these changes difficult. That's helpful. I think we've been hearing that in a different context. For example, planning departments in some of the work we've been doing. I wanted to move on to a question with regards to why many of the cases which are escalated to public service ombudsman are then subsequently closed by yourselves and why that's the case. Especially with regards to the conclusion being that they had been well handled by the public body. I believe 908 of these cases were closed in 2020-21. I just wondered what route then you would then recommend to complainants who then feel that's the door being closed on their concerns. The first thing I'd recommend is that they take advantage of our internal right of review. If there is a complaint closed by a complaints reviewer that has not been a big public report, then I look at all of those myself with support from two executive case officers. I would say first of all go back to the person who handled the complaint, but there is that right of review as well. In terms of what next, it would very much depend on what the issue was because some of them will be out of jurisdiction as in it's more appropriate to go to a different route. Some of them may be technically out of time and although we've tended to try and be quite generous with timescales, there are occasionally those that are just too old. There ultimately though will be some complainers and I recognise this who will just not be happy with the answer they've got. I do understand if they feel all that time and effort I put into it and you're saying you're not going to investigate it. In fact it's not that we don't investigate, it's just that our inquiries at that stage are about making sure that what we are being told is actually what was done, not just a letter saying yeah we've looked into that it's all fine. I think even with some of the very detailed investigations there are a lot of happy people, but there are always a handful of people who disagree with the answer fundamentally. I think those of us who have support constituents, it's sometimes managing expectation around this as well. I wanted to finally just ask with regards to helping vulnerable people and specifically around the Scottish Welfare Fund because I know there's been a number of cases presented to you with regards to people applying for various grants including crisis grants. I just wondered with regards to the number of cases you've seen and how that's been reviewed. I'm going to ask Nicky to answer this one because it's 113. It's a very similar process so there is also a reconsideration process for crisis grants that people can access and obviously the timescales involved in these cases are much much quicker as you would expect so people will receive a response very quickly after making a reconsideration request. We do inform people that there is that access. I think that the crisis grant system there because there are complexities about the guidance so for example if you're making a claim that's more than three claims in a 12 month period there needs to be evidence of exceptional circumstances for example. So we do our best to explain the rationale behind that but I think sometimes that can be hard for people to understand. That's helpful and just finally convener is that. Do you feel we've seen this increase because people have been asked to just provide evidence through emails for example or not being able to get hold of documents for example they can't see their GP to ask for documentation. Is that why we've seen such an increase during this period? The number of reviews being asked specifically around crisis grants or being rejected by local authorities. So I think that our figures are obviously massively inflated by the fact that we're administering the self isolation support grant so that's why you've seen a big increase in the numbers that SPSO are handling. What I would say is that in terms of the way that we handle these cases it's predominantly telephone based and we are very proactive in gathering evidence if somebody is indicating that there is evidence for example from their GP. We will actively go and seek that so that shouldn't be a barrier for them. What would be the average time then to do one of these cases? The crisis grants from the point that we have gathered the evidence we make a decision within a 24 hour period and normally the payments councils are good at making sure that the payments are processed very quickly. That's great, thank you. Thanks very much and we're now going to move on to questions from Willie Coffey who's joining us online. Thank you very much, convener, and good morning, Rosemary, and to your colleagues also. I wonder if we could ask you to say a little bit about how you engage with younger people. The information that we have would suggest to us that we make complaints to the ombudsman. Is that the case and how would you intend to try to make your complaints service more accessible to younger people in particular? Traditionally we don't get many complaints from children and young people. What we are more likely to see is adults making complaints on their behalf whether they've asked for that to happen or not. Pandemic lockdown has made access more difficult for everybody but it's probably not entirely true. We do a lot by telephone, we do a lot by email. I think it's a more fundamental issue and that is where next year is going to be the start of something different because we've been asked by the Scottish Government to develop child-friendly complaints processes for the bodies under our jurisdiction through our complaint standards powers. What that highlights is that it's a whole different approach because this is about the rights of the child and the UNCRC. There are things that will need to happen for how complaints are handled at a local level. I think what it means for us though is we will need to be more proactive in those complaints that are made to us by adults on behalf of children and young people or made to us about how children and young people have received services. The challenge for us is going to be getting the voice of the child and young person in those. I'd also hope that what we would see is that by developing and this is across the public bodies across Scotland in our jurisdiction and by starting to work now on child-friendly complaints processes, that we can also then develop something that other areas, not in my jurisdiction, will be able to adopt over time. We will be looking to try and also develop some resources to go with that. For me, and to an extent a personal view, I think the bigger issue is actually the word complaint. I don't really recall at the age of nine or ten thinking, I don't like what's happened in school today, right? Where can I make a complaint? I think it's about something isn't right and I need somebody to help put it right. I think what this will fundamentally do is change our approach to how we get things put right that are perceived to be wrong by children and young people at the first instance and it's a huge, huge challenge. It's one that I think is really good because what it is fundamentally for me is a rights-based approach and this rights-based approach is something that we've been trying within our legislation to take increasingly. So things like resolution have their genesis in being a rights-based organisation, rights-based approach and how do you help people exercise their right to get a good service. I would say at the moment for children and young people we see almost nothing from them directly and that is fairly traditional, if you like. It's also something that other ombudsmen have commented on and see the same issue. What I do think it is a really good opportunity for, though, is perhaps for organisations who might not traditionally have worked together to perhaps try and work together a bit differently. Even the Children and Young Persons Commissioner, we were really looking forward to moving to Bridgeside House because there are three commissioners or three office holders in the same building and then not that long after it lockdown hit, so the informal exchange we had hasn't been there. I do think there is something about complaint handling that is probably not conducive to achieving outcomes in the right way at the right time. I don't know if you want to say anything more on that because Andrew's background is actually with children and young people. Thank you for that. The important thing you had on it was it's about the engagement, it's about the rights-based approach and actually making sure that whatever we develop is child-centred and child-focused. I think a lot of the work that we will do over the next year with the officer that we're bringing in, although we'll be developing the framework for a complaint mechanism for children, it'll actually be about the learning for organisations and how they look at that early resolution. In my background, as Rosemary said, it's education and we've been doing that in schools for a long time where we've been saying you need to try and resolve things at an early stage, there's lots of different ways that schools do that, but how do we widen that out to other services that children are involved in? How do we make sure that their voice, where they have capacity, is on the table at every stage? So if it is something about a service that they're getting within a school or an annex of a school, like a provision-based service, we need to make sure that there's a mechanism there for them to be able to write at the start and say, this is what I feel is impinging on my rights, and then we need to make sure that there's something in place that if it goes further, there can be a complaint mechanism. I agree with Rosemary, I don't think there'll be a high volume of complaints around those things because historically it's usually the parent or an advocate that's complaining on the child's behalf. So we just need to make sure that when that happens, the child's voice is at the centre immediately so that their views are on the table. A lot like the tribunal service has shifted now as well. OK, thank you very much for that. I want to ask a question on digital engagement to Rosemary. Is it still the case that people are supposed to write to the ombudsman in writing? I noticed in your report that last year, I think it was, 67 per cent of complaints came in via site of your web form. Can you clarify that position? I know that there was a discussion in the last local government committee about this issue about whether complaints could be accepted online or not, so can you clarify that please for me? I think that in writing is probably a reflection of the language at the time in a written recorded format. So an email is in writing. I think it's the things that we can't, unless the complainer can demonstrate exceptional or special circumstances, we couldn't, for example, just take a complaint over the phone in the same way that welfare fund applications can be taken. In writing, we are moving increasingly to encourage people to make complaints using our online form, partly because that has contextual advice with it and has inherently got signposting with it, enables us to get the right documents fairly quickly from them, which helps with that triaging service. So email is classed as in writing, and of those we get, we are getting, I think that you quoted that figure, we've seen a big rise in the number of online complaint forms, and that is consistent with other areas of public sector and it's consistent with other ombudsmen. It is something that we're constantly developing, though, our online form, because it's not just a way of capturing a complaint, it's also very often the first contact somebody might have with us. So we're trying to manage things like if your complaint is about, you haven't complained to the local authority first, you need to go to them first, and if that doesn't happen, you can come to us for advice on this. It's proven to be one of the benefits of lockdown, I would say, that it's increased the number of online complaint forms. Absolutely, we've found that in a number of areas where the whole digital engagement in many ways saved today in a number of circumstances, so it's good to hear that that route is opening up much more to people to use the ombudsman service. I'm just wondering if that has led to different groups of people that perhaps might not use the ombudsman service. We spoke about younger people there, but are there other groups of people that you might expect to engage with the ombudsman services that either do or didn't, and are you finding that perhaps they are doing so much more now because it's much easier to raise issues with you digitally? I can't say that, but there are certainly sectors that can't contact us digitally, but I might ask Nicky if she'd like to pick up on those. I just wanted to add that during lockdown, one of the things that we did do immediately was make sure that we continued to staff the office because there are still a reasonable proportion of people that do make complaints through old-fashioned means of letters, particularly for our prison complainants. That is the only mechanism. There will always be a portion of our service users that are potentially digitally excluded for one reason or another, so we do really recognise the importance of continuing to be able to offer that service. Okay. Thanks very much for that, all of you. Thank you very much back to you, convener. Thank you, Willie. I'm now going to bring in Paul McLennan with questions. Thanks, convener. I'll start. I'll just refer members to my register of interest. I'm a serving councillor in Eastwood. Good morning, panel. I suppose that the next two questions for me are probably more on preventative work that's possible out there. I think that part of your role is promoting local resolution and improving complaint saddling across Scotland's public bodies. I suppose that you're just really asking, probably yourself, Rosemary, first of all, what you can say more about preventative work, including training that's had on SPSO caseloads and I know that's difficult in the last couple of years, but traditionally, and do you see a role for that probably as we come out of the pandemic in trying to reduce the complaints that come to yourself? Because obviously that's the ultimate that we want to do, is reduce the number of complaints that go to yourself. Just more on what's happened in the past and where do you see the role of training moving forward? A couple of things on that. Training has not stopped happening. I'll ask Andrew in the moment to pick that up. I think you've hit the nail on the head with it's important to actually get good complaint handling. And one of the things that we are currently doing, and this is next year's business plan, but it's borne out of experiences, we are looking, coming out of lockdown, not just at the training that's provided, we do provide specific training courses, but also at looking at how we engage and how we raise awareness of some things, particular issues that might come out of our own monitoring of complaints. We have what's a support and intervention policy and what we do through that is we will track themes and trends. If we spot a trend and a theme, we will either do something through Andrew's team across public bodies or a sector. If we spot a trend within a particular public body, then we will make direct contact. I know that Nick in some of her colleagues have provided specific training to public bodies. I'll hand over to Andrew at this point, because his team is currently working on this. Thank you. As Rosemary said, training hasn't stopped the whole way through. We moved very quickly to a digital delivery. We continued to offer two courses, so there was good complaint handling and investigation skills. The uptake digitally has been such that it's actually put quite a lot of pressure on the training that we deliver, so we were booked all through the year, we've got bookings pre-booked for the next financial year already. The important shift, through all the work, has been that informal training that came out of good relationships, that came through the ability to do meetings digitally. That engagement focus is going to be huge for us next year. What we've established in the team is that those conversations and using the support and intervention policy are delivering really good minute-to-minute training. As we said, there's quite a high ton over our staff, so, again, we're looking at across public bodies, we're looking at do we look at a re-accreditation model, how do we make sure that we're continuing to monitor that people are at that standard, so that we don't see that there's a theme or trend of oh, you need training, it's not being for this long. Over the past two quarters, we've been looking at how we developed that for our business plan moving forward. We will still offer the good complaints handling, the investigation skills, the core modules that will allow people to give a better service, but I think that there will be a greater focus on ongoing continuous informal training of oh, okay, we've identified this bit of practice, so how can we help you roll that out within your sector? The other thing about the training delivery, it's been across every sector, there's not been a sector that hasn't engaged in that over the past year that I've been here now. We've got lots of stats that we could give you on that, about the volume of modules and the range of people that have been engaged, and the positive feedback that we get from it on a weekly basis. Thanks for that. The second part of the question, it's really just a lead-on from that, because I think that Graeme Deyme asked a question about local authorities, and in particular about the consistency about that. I suppose it's coming back, but where do you involve, I suppose when you're talking about the training opportunities, it's maybe organisations coming to yourself. Do you monitor, for example, what training that the improvement service put on, or local authorities themselves put on? Because again, if they're coming to you, then they're being proactive. Does it mean that the local authority or everybody's doing that? So is there a monitor, or do you monitor the improvement that they're trying to coordinate, if you like, through what they're doing, through training? And how does that coordinate, obviously, with your own work? Yeah. So it's not a formal monitoring. We do that through that engagement of the network. So if you look at the local authority complaint handlers network, one of the items in the agenda is around training, is around staff turnover and where they are. So what we would expect is, if we're making a recommendation through our support and intervention policy, our first point would be, tell us specifically what's being put on now, so that we can either supplement it or ensure that you've got the correct information. It's not something that we actively pull on a quarterly basis, but if we need to go into it, then we have the mechanism and we have the relationships to do that. Thank you. Thank you, Paul. I'm now going to move to a question from Megan Gallagher. Thank you, convener. Good morning, panel. Can I refer members to my register of interest, as I'm a serving councillor in North Lanarkshire? I'd like to pick up on the NHS whistleblowing service, and in particular, the relatively low number of cases and inquiries coming in to the new independent national whistleblowing officer. I would like to ask what will the SPSO do to raise awareness amongst front-line NHS staff? We have already produced and it's available on the TURAS site for NHS2 online training modules. One of those is aimed specifically at managers who may be the ones receiving concerns. One is for any staff and we are we've already encouraged organisations to make that part of an induction programme to ensure that staff access that training. There's been quite good take-up of it certainly in the first few months. What I would say is of more more of a focus for us from this point is is getting the governance of organisations to recognise that they have a responsibility to ensure that their staff are properly trained, that they know how to raise a whistleblowing concern, that actually they know how to just speak up so it doesn't have to be a whistleblowing concern. So this is all the underlying aims about improving culture, the culture of speaking up. What I can't answer because I don't know is whether the number that's low that's coming to us is the result of their being handled well in the first instance because we have only got data coming through quite slowly ourselves and I haven't we didn't really have a complete feel for would we get lots and lots and lots of concerns raised or would there not be many and the low numbers can be indicative of two things. They can be indicative of people speak up or they can be indicative of people are afraid to speak up still because of what that will mean. So quite a lot of our enquiries have been about signposting people back to the organisation because they maybe just weren't aware of the standards. We're also going to be as part of the engagement coming out of lockdown going doing more engagement particularly at board and management level because the resources are there for frontline staff already and actually I think the key success factor for all of this is for every level of the organisation to understand it's a responsibility for everyone to know how to raise a concern how to speak up what the general mechanisms are and the cultural type of things when we look at complaints that ultimately come to us we can't overnight change the culture of an organisation but what we can do is start with the resources we have and part of that is I think coming back to Andrew's point this is about now continuous engagement and we are already meeting with some of the health boards we've been doing in the early pre-going live on this we actually did go and speak to all boards chief executives group we will continue to do that there are also now whistle blowing champions in place and we we attend their quarterly whistle blowing champions meeting and that is a very constructive relationship because although they are non-executive directors and they are not within our jurisdiction that is a really powerful network to share good practice I'm undecided about whether the small number is indicative of it not being taken up or whether it is more complex than that and I think some of this is likely to be more complex as in we all see in the press NHS staff are tired they are working long hours and making any form of complaint or whistle blowing is stressful and to do that on top of an already stressful job I think just basically is a big thing to do but it's certainly something that as we build up our own data we will also now we're asking the boards and cells to let us have your quarterly data because they're supposed to consider it at board level and that's one of the things that we are going to be checking has the executive reported whistle blowing complaints at board level now that might seem a long way away from training but if you don't get whistle blowing embedded then the training is not going to be embedded within the organisation systems it should be within pupils personal development plans there should be not just training but awareness within intranet within staff procedures and handbooks but it must for me start with the induction of staff it's as important as any other probably one of the most important HR and improvement type policies on the point that you made in relation to receiving data from the board how will you intend to try and keep that continuous because it might go well at the beginning and then it sort of tailors off to a number of different issues so how do you intend to keep that going to ensure that you're getting that data so you can make those improvements part of it will be through our engagement with groups like the whistle blowing champions but also you've heard Andrew refer to local authority network and housing network we're also in the process of putting in place confidential contacts network so we will have that relationship with the non-management level as well if you like through and that will be through Andrew's team as well because some of this I think is about helping understanding of something that is inherently new anyway the principles are there everyone signed up to it it's now about embedding and a lot of the good learning and what I think will be critical to consistency is things like the whistle blowing champions the confidential contacts sharing their own experience and learning because we've seen how well that works for example for local authorities thank you and in relation to the telephone number that was launched would you see that this has been successful as people contacted you through that method and has there been more of a response through the telephone number as opposed to other methods I'd say probably most of our contact has come through the telephone there's a number of reasons partly because it's there it's also the first number that will probably come up on a google search if you put in about health in Scotland so some of our work has been signposting to other areas it's also a way I think of people being able to ask questions and ask for advice anonymously that you couldn't do through email in quite the same way we'll also I think with the telephone it's offered at different times of day which we've tried to do so that it's available for different times when people may or may not be working but certainly it's tailed off a bit but I think that's probably as organisations themselves have given more information what I do think we have to be careful about is always saying oh it was difficult because of lockdown knowing should happen if it needs to happen irrespective and actually during lockdown and the pressures that the NHS are under is probably a time when it most needs to happen and we are beginning to get inquiries now for example about staffing levels being patient safety issues That's great, thank you very much so you'll be pleased to hear there's one last question that's a useful discussion this morning and I just want to take us out into a global level so I read in your submission that the international community has set new standards and expectations for ombudsmen which have been ratified at a UN level and I'm just interested to hear how does the current setup in Scotland compare This is where I have to hold my hair shirt up we did say last year we'd write to the committee to put a report before Parliament on this but because it requires primary legislation and we knew that other things probably were getting away it's not happened at that point we've, if you like, self-assessed ourselves against is the Venice principles and there are a couple of areas where there's significant change needed where Scotland is now tailing behind so even five, six years ago we were seen as the leaders in jurisdiction relating to ombudsmen we were the first to have complaint standards authority complaints handling but one of the fundamental things that the Venice principles requires that ombudsmen can look at issues under their own initiative Wales now has that Northern Ireland has that it's fairly common practice for most European ombudsmen they look like you've been used sometimes if you say I need to have own initiative powers but this is about being able to investigate an issue without having a complaint now not just because it's a principle if it was not in the principle I would be pursuing it anyway and this for me is fundamentally about that giving a voice to the voiceless it's about us seeing things from our own intelligence from what we learn through groups we sit on so for example Nikki sits on the sharing health intelligence group and it's about being able to try and identify those areas where one investigation can pick up something before it has gone through all of these roots the landscape for scrutiny is getting increasingly complex I think in Scotland but in terms of accessibility and impact being able to look at something because we have identified it's in the public interest is the fundamental thing that I would be I'd say we don't match on there are some other areas of jurisdiction bearing in mind that the SPSO Act was written long before we had any of these discussions about digital services and the very fact that a complaint has to be in writing and the onus is on the complainer to show why there are special circumstances I think indicates that there are some things in it that really need to be looked at afresh as in complaints shouldn't have to just be in writing there should be to make them accessible there need to be other ways that people can complain to us but also I think that there needs to be data savvy I think the whole of public service are becoming more data savvy but it's no good at all collecting data in our individual organisations that our own legislation allows us to collect it's how it's all joined up so I think for me some of the this is about information sharing powers not personal data sharing powers but if we identify something that is a patient safety issue for example we could refer it to another body but I think there needs to be more real time interaction and there will come a point where we need to change what those information sharing powers are but my three big ones would be own initiative in any form and tidying up for once for the better word what we can share with home that's very helpful and yes we're talking about an act that was written 20 years ago and really in the last 20 years so much has changed just a tiny little question and maybe it's a small question but maybe too big of an answer but if we wanted because I read also in our papers in order to make those changes we would have to do that in primary legislation so presumably we would have to looking towards the next session for that what would we need to be doing now in order to get that set up so that that could come about what would need to happen now I think is for us to get something to Parliament and that's not a technical paper I think that is something very straightforward pretty much in the sort of language we've been talking about here the other thing I think is all the way through when we've been consulted over other legislation I've raised it every time oh so child friendly complaints is actually a good example where it would help if the legislation gave us own initiative powers in relation to child-based complaints so for us it's getting something to you and I think it's really about the parliamentary debate and then getting it on to a legislative programme because we have tried a couple of times even on things that can be changed by secondary legislation and there have just been things all the time first it was Brexit then it was locked down and coronavirus and if it can be on the legislative programme before I admit office in three years I will feel I have achieved something okay well I welcome you bringing something to us and let's see what we can do in that direction so thank you so much we have come to the end of our question so thank you it's been a very useful discussion and we agreed at the start of the meeting to take the next item in private so I thank you for being with us and I now close the public part of the meeting