Agenda item

1.    The Customer Experience and Engagement Manager presented the Annual Customer Feedback Report 2023/24 to Members and highlighted the transportation backlog and Special Education Needs Development (SEND) as specific areas of focus.

2.    In response to questions and comments from Members it was said that:

a)    The Ombudsman had changed the way complaints were managed and this had impacted the figures, as evident from Table 18 of the report.  The LGSCO will now only investigate if they believe that there is a case to answer or there is likely to be a wider impact.

b)    The high level of SEND complaints investigated by the Ombudsman was not exclusive to Kent, but a national issue.

c)    Members were assured that significant progress had been made over the last 13 months to address the backlog in issuing EHCP within the statutory timescales

d)    The Ombudsman filed in favour of many Applicants when reviewing applications for Educational Health and Care Plans was down to the fact that an answer from the Council had not been supplied within a 20-week timeframe; this was not a reflection of any judgment error. Kent currently was 27% over and above the national average for dealing and issuing Educational Health and Care Plans.

e)     An extra £2 million had been invested in building SEND capacity during this year’s budget to deal with the backlog to get back on to sustainable footing.

f)     The Corporate Director for Children, Young People and Education confirmed that during 2024, the complaints backlog in their directorate had reduced from impacting 618 individuals to 213 as additional funding allowed the number to reduced.

g)    The Corporate Director for Adult Social Care confirmed that Adult Social Care Teams remained under resourced locally and Social Workers were dealing with complaints in addition to providing urgent care and attention to vulnerable adults.

h)    The contrast between years 2022 and 2024 shown on page 23 table 8 was due to the insufficient resource issues for Highways and Transportation which resulted in recruitment.

i)      Blue Badges were confirmed to be a significant part of Adult Social Care (ASC) complaint backlog. This was due to a 30% increase in applications for Blue Badges, attributed to a change in the eligibility criteria: hidden disabilities now qualified applicants for a Blue Badge. To address the backlog, two additional hires had been authorised to assess complex applications.

j)     For complaints surrounding ASC, there had been a slight change in the way these had been approached; some stage 1 complaints had been logged as stage 2 complaints as this allowed for any instance where further questions were raised about the original complaint and/or any subsequent complaints, in a more streamlined resolution process.

k)     More feedback and comments from service users had been logged as part of the learning process (even though no response was required). GED (Growth, Economic Development and Communities) started logging more responses from members of the public who used the online household recycling site in to learn from the comments. This accounted for the large spike in figures.

l)     Work had been carried out around staff training, systems and technology, expectation of frontline staff to work on both quality of response and timeliness of response. Effective leadership had worked on the based that performing a professional job and dealing with complaints are one in the same.

m)  Legal costs for Ombudsman cases were low and the KCC legal team did not often get involved as the Customer Engagement and Experience Manager (and team) dealt with them. The complaints which brought a compensatory element were often due to a civil claims for items such as negligence or a breach of a statutory duty. These were sometimes dealt with by insurers and other times via KCC.

3.      RESOLVED to note the contents of the Annual Customer Feedback Report 2023/24.