Issue - items at meetings - Complaints and Information Annual Report 2021/22

Issue - meetings

Complaints and Information Annual Report 2021/22

Meeting: 16/03/2023 - General Purposes Committee (Item 4)

4 Update on Corporate Complaint Improvement Actions pdf icon PDF 175 KB

The committee is recommended to note progress updates on corporate complaints learning actions and in-year performance for MEQs as requested by the Committee.

 

Additional documents:

Minutes:

The Head of Transformation explained that the purpose of the report was to respond to the request from the committee in October 2022 to provide an update on improvements to corporate complaints handling as detailed in the Corporate Complaints Annual Report 2021-22 and an in-year progress update regarding Member Enquiry (MEQs) performance.

 

Members expressed concerns regarding the repeated missed bin collection for some residents over a number of months and stated that they expected that the issues be identified and addressed appropriately.

 

Dissatisfaction was expressed by Members regarding the MEQ system, which they did not consider to be intuitive and easy to use. They used the Council’s website to submit service requests as they found this to be more responsive to the immediate needs of the resident. The MEQ system they considered to be useful to ascertain the reasons why a service request had been necessary.

 

Members accepted that not all service requests or MEQs could be responded to immediately or within the deadline. However, they did not consider some of the holding responses to be informative or proactive. When the responder did provide a further update, the quality of the response was sometimes poor and uninformative. These were the main reasons why Members rejected the response.

 

Members were of the view that customers should be informed of the reason for the delay, the need to send a holding response, the timeline when to expect the full response and what action will be taken. The officers involved in the MEQ system and those who provided related training be advised of this and the guidance be amended to include this information.

 

ACTION: Head of Transformation/Digital Services Training Officer

 

The Director of Environment and Operational Services reported that as a result of the information extracted from the high levels of data received a full-service review had been initiated. With regards to parks and cemeteries, he accepted that there were issues in this service area and explained that these were down to insufficient management and business support, particularly where managers were carrying out administrative work rather than managing the staff and operations. The pandemic had and continued to have to some extent, an impact on service provision, particularly in some areas such as waste collection for a number or reasons. The poor quality of the responses had been recognised and was acknowledged and was being addressed with further training. Continuous service review and improvement was critical to the work of the Council, including the use of advances in information technology. He advised that all Members used the Council’s website to report missed bins and similar service requests as this was a speedier way to resolve the issue.

 

The Director of Environment and Operational Services welcomed the suggestion regarding the possible use of information technology including bar codes on individual bins. He acknowledged that it was not ideal that the only way to obtain a resolution to the long standing or repetitive issues such as those referred to by the Member earlier, asked that  ...  view the full minutes text for item 4


Meeting: 20/10/2022 - General Purposes Committee (Item 5)

5 Enfield Council Corporate Complaints Annual Report 2021-22 pdf icon PDF 167 KB

The report summarises the findings of the Corporate Complaints Annual Report 2021-22, focusing on the nature of complaints and the learning they provide to improve services in the future, together with an overview of Member Enquires (MEQ) response quality analysis findings as requested by the Committee in May 2022.

Additional documents:

Minutes:

The report was introduced by Eleanor Brown, Head of Transformation. The report summarised the findings of the review of corporate complaints during 2021-22 and focused on the nature of complaints and the learning they provided to improve services in the future.  The report also provided an overview of Member Enquires (MEQ) which had been requested by the Committee in May 2022.

 

Officers advised that the case management systems for complaints, subject access requests (SARs) and Member enquiries were still being improved to improve user experience and to improve the way we submit and the extract information for action and analysis.

 

Members considered a response time of six weeks to respond to MEQs to be unacceptable.  Officers acknowledged that there had been a delay in providing responses to some MEQs and that this was due in part to some staff in departments not fully understanding the system and how to process the MEQs.

 

The introduction of the new MEQ case management system, resource structure and handling policy during 2022/23 were designed to improve response performance and quality of those responses to Members and consequently to residents.  Where skills, knowledge gaps or poor understanding of the use of the system had been identified training had been provided and would continue to be provided.

 

The Executive Director – Resources confirmed that the information relating to complaints was seen by the Chief Executive, Executive Directors and Directors and that work is on-going to address and understand the reasons behind the high volumes of service requests and particular issues, such as missed bins.  Should a MEQ be closed prematurely, or the service request not be dealt with satisfactorily, members were asked to send the case to the Executive Director/Director. Whilst Officers were continually striving to improve service areas and the target was to respond to 95% of MEQs within 8 days, it was acknowledged that an 80% response rate was unsatisfactory. 

 

Members commented that the MEQ training and working group had been very useful, and the involvement of additional members would be welcomed.

 

Officers, in response to a question from a member regarding whether there had been a reduction in the submission of MEQs through the new system compared to the previous methods, undertook to provide the information. Generally, there were fluctuations over the year in each quarter.

 

AGREED that the findings and improvement actions included in the Corporate Complaints Annual Report be noted and a further update report be brought to the meeting of the General Purposes Committee on 16 March 2023.


Meeting: 29/09/2022 - Overview & Scrutiny Committee (Item 4)

4 ENFIELD COUNCIL CORPORATE COMPLAINTS ANNUAL REPORT 2021-22 pdf icon PDF 137 KB

The report summarises the findings of the Corporate Complaints Annual Report 2021-22 and focuses on the nature of complaints and learning they provide to improve services in the future.

Additional documents:

Minutes:

The report summarised the findings of the Corporate Complaints Annual Report 2021-22 and focused on the nature of complaints and learning they provided to improve services in the future.

 

Fay Hammond, Executive Director of Resources, introduced the report and invited questions from the Committee.

 

Members of the Committee asked the following questions:

 

Q.  The 27 complaints advised as upheld by the Ombudsman were highlighted, but that the report provided little information on these. It was suggested that a narrative paragraph be included in the report as a matter of course, as there was a breakdown for other complaints, but not the 27 upheld. It was requested that the categorisation / detail of the 27 complaints upheld by the Ombudsman be circulated to OSC Members.

A.  Fay Hammond advised that the information could be provided by email, and that officers would be able to attend a future meeting if Members had further questions.

ACTION:  Fay Hammond / Will Wraxall / Governance Team

 

A summary of the 27 upheld Ombudsman complaints 2021-22, including the substance of the complaint, and the actions agreed to address them, was circulated to Members.

 

Q.  Members asked what was being done to understand the nature of complaints received, and to deal with more issues preventatively.

A.  It was advised that there had been work undertaken to investigate the root cause of waste service complaints and issues, including officers going out with bin collection crews, analysis of data from customers and crews, and customer call centre staff sitting with the waste service officers. Some issues had been identified in relation to agency staff, which had now reduced as more crew were now permanent. From the last data, for August, the number of missed bins was reduced. More data would also be gathered for September. It was most important to prevent issues arising in the first place.

In respect of Housing repairs, there had been a restructuring of staff so that customer call team staff were now based in the Edmonton Green housing hub with the housing repairs staff. This had led to improved performance.

 

Q.  Members questioned that the table at para 3.3 of the report did not add up to 100%.

A.  It was possible this was a result of combined complaints, or miscellaneous categories, but would be checked and a response provided to OSC Members.

ACTION:  Fay Hammond / Will Wraxall / Governance Team

 

The figures in the table only included services which received at least 1% of total complaints. The remaining 20% of total complaints consists of a number of services which receive very few complaints individually, but which total between them 11% of complaints. It also included 9% of total complaints which had not been assigned a category correctly – this has been addressed as a control issue with the introduction of Verint, for which a service must be identified within the system when allocating the complaint. The Complaints team apologises for the lack of clarity in the OSC report and will look to  ...  view the full minutes text for item 4


Meeting: 08/09/2022 - Overview & Scrutiny Committee (Item 4.)

4. ENFIELD COUNCIL CORPORATE COMPLAINTS ANNUAL REPORT 2021-22 pdf icon PDF 137 KB

The report summarises the findings of the Corporate Complaints Annual Report 2021-22 and focuses on the nature of complaints and learning they provide to improve services in the future.

Additional documents: