Complaints procedure rewritten to protect the CEO.
Complaints procedure rewritten to protect the CEO.The complaints procedure used to have 3 stages. It has been reduced to 2. It will no longer have a stage-three input from the CEO. Instead, it will go straight to the local Government Ombudsman. Nice for the CEO. If the LGO finds the Council guilty of maladministration, the CEO will no longer be implicated.The CEO should be held accountable for anything and everything those under him do. He is paid enough to take responsibility for their behaviour. The change was discussed at the cabinet meeting of 10.11.21. The rationale for trimming away the third stage was that it was found that the stage-three review did not change the outcome for the complainant. The same might be said of stage two, because the officers who review the response of the stage-one respondent (their colleague) act not with the honesty and impartiality required of a public servant but as “counsel for the defence” for their colleague. The usual trick, even at stage one, is to claim the matter has already been dealt with. At the cabinet meeting, there was no discussion of whether the CEO should not still play a part in the process by being the second-stage respondent. So, now the CEO has no responsibility to investigate the behaviour of the senior officers below him, which one would have thought was one of his functions. The author of the proposal put before the Cabinet for this change was Alison Reynolds,who has control of the complaints procedure. This is the Alison Reynolds who when asked to investigate a complaint against a senior colleague wrote “I have concluded that all of the matters raised as part of this case have now been addressed” - even though she was the first person to address them - and handn’t addressed them and didn’t! The complaints procedure is corrupted by senior officers who protect their senior colleagues by this quick-fix comment (“already dealt with”). It has become institutionalised by repetition.
Andrew Farmer ● 1322d1 Comments