Health Service Commissioner for England (Complaint Handling) Bill — House of Commons, 2015-02-27
Topic: Health
Christopher Robert Chope (Conservative, Centre-right): Again, my hon. Friend makes a first-class point. I hope that, when the Minister responds to this short debate, she will support the line that is being taken. We need to ensure that there is no scope for statutory bodies to avoid their responsibilities to deliver and that we facilitate the ombudsman to reach a result within 12 months of a complaint being made At the moment, the ombudsman is dealing with about 4,000 complaints a year, some 3,000 of which are related to health. The cost of those complaints to the taxpayer is about £4,000 a time. As the taxpayer is investing that amount of money, a reasonable return on that would be to say that those complaints should be dealt with in a maximum period of one year. If we pass new clause 3 and include it in the Bill, we will have a useful piece of legislation, instead of an empty vessel—although even an empty vessel with the name of my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden on it will be cherished by many people, especially his constituents Amendment 3 is more specific. It will require the commissioner, in fulfilling the obligations set out in clause 1, to explain the delay before the end of the 12-month period, rather than after it. At the moment, there is a lacuna here—perhaps it is a deliberate one—to ensure that the minimum pressure is applied, which will show that we are just engaged in gesture politics. I hope that that is not correct. As it stands, clause 1(2) says: "Where the Commissioner has not concluded an investigation before the end of the 12-month period…the Commissioner must send a statement explaining the reason for the delay to the person who made the complaint." But it does not say when the commissioner should send that statement. Unless there is a requirement on the timing of that statement, the measure is completely meaningless. It may be that that statement will be sent at the same time as the ultimate decision is made. In an effort to make the Bill do what my right hon. Friend wants it to do, which is to put pressure on the health service commissioner to deal with complaints in a timely fashion, I am suggesting a modest amendment Amendment 4 is on the same theme. When that statement is sent, it would not just explain the reason for the delay, but contain an estimate of the target date for completion of the investigation. I accept that, in itself, that would not be much use, because if there is another target date—it could be in another year—there may still be no remedy for the complainant. At least, though, it would force the ombudsman service to apply its mind to how much longer it thought it was reasonable for the investigation of the complaint to take Amendment 5 brings us into a slightly different territory. I suspect that a main reason for the delay in dealing with these complaints is a lack of resource. The amendment would add to clause 1 the words: "If the reason for the delay specified in Section 2HA is lack of financial resources it shall be the duty of the Commissioner to set out the action which is being taken to remedy that lack of financial resource." Again, if the delay is due to financial reasons, it is surely important that the world outside, and particularly the complainant, should know about that so that they can make the necessary complaints. It is also important that the ombudsman is able to say, "Well, because of a lack of financial resources, I am not able to deal with these cases as quickly as I would have wished. Therefore, I am asking Parliament for more money to help us meet our case load." There is a £15 million budget for this exercise. Each case currently costs some £4,000 on average. The average compensation payment that was paid out in 628 cases amounts to less than £1,000. I am not sure that anyone coming from another planet and looking at this system would say that it is financially well focused. The average cost of dealing with a complaint is over £4,000. The average amount paid to a successful complainant is just less than £1,000. That shows that there is a potential problem in relation to the funding of the ombudsman service. That may be exacerbated by the ombudsman’s decision to take on more complaints for investigation by "lowering the threshold" for investigating such complaints. As the annual report makes clear, the consequence of that is an increase in the number of complaints being investigated, only a reduced proportion of which is being concluded in favour of the complainant. Expectations among the complainants are being raised, but they are not being delivered on by the ombudsman because a lot more cases are being taken on which probably should not have been taken on in the first place. The report states that because the ombudsman is "taking on many more investigations than before, the proportion of investigations…upheld or partly upheld has inevitably declined" I think that the expression "inevitably declined" is a bit of an underestimate, because it has declined from 86% to 42%, which is a dramatic reduction in one year.