| I wrote an article which was published in The Times on 15 March 2005, criticising the complacent and partisan nature of the Local Government Ombudsman's office. It was reduced in length for reasons of space. The full version follows: "Not before time, the Select Committee on the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister is today [Tuesday March 15] hearing evidence on the effectiveness of the Local Government Ombudsman.
This is welcome: anyone who does not feel a sense of injustice at the way local authorities routinely conduct themselves has, I would suggest, experienced so much shabby behaviour they have lost their sense of outrage.
The need for an effective body policing local government excesses is more important now than ever before. Who monitors the slowly unfolding disaster that is local government under the Local Government Act 2000 changes? These 'reforms' destroyed the distinction between local government officers and councillors. Officers used to be paid but had limited decision-making powers. Councillors were unpaid elected representatives. Now they are all paid and officers have greater authority.
The introduction of money into the system of local representation is an open door to corruption - this is not to say that corruption is invariably dining with your local council, just that the door is open, the lamps trimmed and the seat warm. Mr Graft will not be turned away.
The ballot box theoretically gives the public a choice, but no one gives the public to the right to vote for councillors who are not paid, or a council in which they can participate in public committee meetings. Now there are no unpaid councillors and most of the committee meetings have been abolished. An increasingly popular electoral choice is for people not to vote, to demonstrate their disgust with the system, or vote for a joke candidate such as a football mascot.
With both councillors and officers paid for participating in the system, there is no incentive for anyone to rein in its cost, or administrative excesses. Our one defence against misuse of local power is the Ombudsman's office, set up in 1974 to investigate 'maladministration' leading to 'injustice.' The Act under which the Ombudsman operates does not define injustice, he has to do that himself, and define it he does.
Of 11,600 complaints sent to the LGO for England in 2003/4, only 180 cases, that is fewer than 1.6% of the total, were found to be maladministration. How is such an absurdly low figure of findings in favour of people who think themselves aggrieved reached?
I was given an object lesson in Ombudsman investigation when I represented a small community group in a London borough who suffered legal bullying culminating in a travesty of a hearing in which in which the organisation was called before a group of three councillors and three officers and accused of something written on a 'secret agenda' so they had to defend themselves from a charge which they did not know.
When this abomination was reported to the Ombudsman he found that the abuse of legal services to achieve a dubious policy goal was 'not something in which the Ombudsman can become involved' as 'I believe that the Council is entitled to consult whichever officers it believes is appropriate.' The Ombudsman's officer claimed he could not question the decision to hold a meeting in confidential session and to deny the subjects of the meeting information about the charges against them as 'this is a decision it [the council] is entitled to reach and not something that the Ombudsman can question.'
One wonders how much more glaring an injustice the Ombudsman has to see before taking action. The underlying problem is that the Ombudsman's office is too close to the organisation it is charged with investigating. Two of the three current English Ombudsmen are former local authority chief officers, all three deputy Ombudsmen worked in local government before joining the commission. How can we expect impartiality from people who owe their status and their professional background to precisely the local government ethos they are called upon to investigate? Their automatic assumption seems to be that councils have acted in a fair and public spirited manner, and that the complainant is in the wrong.
Do these local issues really matter? Local government already suffers from a lack of scrutiny, as it is all just too little for national coverage and few local newspapers are up to the challenge of investigative reporting. Yet local government is not little, it is the biggest employer in the country, with 2.1 million staff in England and Wales, spending a quarter of all national government expenditure. The local is national and we should pay more attention to a fair system of complaints about it.
A local government complaints commission, on the same lines as the new Police Complaints Commission, would not be a solution to the abuses of local government, but it would at least prevent the obvious absurdity of the guardians guarding themselves."
The organisation campaigning for an independent Local Government Complaints Commission is LGOwatch. Their website is
www.ombudsmanwatch.org
Jad Adams Please note this article is copyright Jad Adams (2005)
Click here to visit Jad Adam's website
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