To inform the committee of performance in the areas of complaints, data incidents and requests for information made to the council over the municipal year 2018/19.

The information access and records manager presented the report and highlighted the following:

·         The report should show that there were processes in place to deal with complaints and requests for information.

·         Herefordshire compares well with other council in respect of meeting deadlines and uphold rates.

·         When things go wrong, the council is mindful of the impact on individuals and communities.

·         There is learning from complaints in order to improve services in the future. 

During the discussion of the item, the following points were noted:

·         The number of complaints was down. 

·         There was an analysis of how well the complaints were dealt with.   Complaints were quality assured as the issues raised were about things that mattered to people and the council recognises the importance of providing a full investigation and response. 

·         Complaints are initially investigated by the department as that is where the knowledge would sit.   If people were not satisfied, then they could complain to the Social Care and Local Government Ombudsman (LGSCO).    With children’s social care complaints, there were two other stages which were independent.

·         The chief executive was satisfied that there were processes in place and confirmed that management board did look at the learning from complaints.  

·         There was annual mandatory staff training in information governance.  

·         The children’s social care complaints were primarily due to service failure.   It was confirmed that there was follow up with the complaints as it was a significant work place risk.   It was noted that there were challenges in children’s social care which meant that there were more agency staff in post.   Whilst these agency staff were important to the council, they did have different experiences and occasionally issues were only identified after they had left.   This highlighted the need to have a fully staffed children’s social care team.   A risk had been recently added to the corporate risk register in relation to staffing in children’s social care. 

·         If the team saw that there were still complaints in one area after training or process changes, this was escalated to senior managers.

·         Where there was LGSCO involvement in a complaint, the LGSCO will check and require evidence to see if matters had improved or been remedied. 

·         Recommendations or lessons learned were logged and the information access team did check with the services to see what had changed. 

·         Freedom of information requests were time consuming though a necessary component for council transparency.  The main obstacles to publishing more information on the website was work capacity as it was not just making the information available.  For example, the information needed to be indexed,  checked for accuracy and to ensure that no personal data was inadvertently published.   

·         Under the General Data Protection Regulations, individuals had the right to ask by a subject access request (SAR) to see information held about them.   These requests could be time consuming if an individual had a lot of contact with the council.   This emphasised the need to have information easily accessible within the council so time is not wasted gathering information  ...  view the full minutes text for item 404