Official Report: Minutes of Evidence

The Chairperson (Mr Chambers): Good morning. It is my privilege again to welcome Margaret Kelly, the Northern Ireland Public Services Ombudsman (NIPSO); Sean Martin, the deputy ombudsman; and Michael McClean, finance and corporate services manager. I invite you to begin your briefing.

Ms Margaret Kelly (Northern Ireland Public Services Ombudsman): Good morning, Chair, and members. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to say a few introductory words in addition to the budget paper.

There are a few matters that I want to take the opportunity to bring to your attention. The first one is the ongoing and significant increase in the number of complaints. The Committee will know that we indicated to you last year that we thought that our complaints would number around 1,250, and perhaps even rise as far as 1,300. You will know that we exceeded that, with 1,333 complaints coming through the door and an additional 334 re-presented.

I can advise the Committee that, since that time, in the current year, we have seen a 30% increase in complaints coming through the door. That has almost been weekly and certainly monthly. So, we are seeing no drop-off whatsoever in the number of complaints coming through. We estimate that, in the current year, we will see somewhere between 1,600 and 1,700 complaints, with approximately 380 being re-presented. That will create a stretch across the teams in the office. Although I hope that it indicates a confidence in the public's bringing the complaints to us, it is without doubt a reflection of the pressure on all our public services.

If that trend continues, we expect the office to reach 2,000 complaints by about 2027-28, which would be a quadrupling of the number from 2016. We continue to monitor our processes and approaches to absorb and address that level of complaint. As we indicate in the paper, that includes trying to settle as many cases as possible at our stage 2 investigation, which is the shorter, 10-week investigation, and manage the numbers that go to the stage 3, 52-week investigation. Obviously, we have to maintain our quality and quality assurance. We have to make sure that the serious complex cases that require that level of investigation get it. That is why the public come to us.

When I last presented to the Committee, I drew your attention to the increased complexity and seriousness of the cases that we were seeing. That very much continues to be the case. I will provide a number of examples to the Committee in that regard. We have seen quite a number of cases in which the downgrading of health referrals from GPs to trusts has resulted in late cancer diagnoses. We have seen quite a number of cases of a failure to identify sepsis, and a number of cases of the impact of not responding thoroughly to people experiencing acute mental health episodes. There was quite a significant case involving a child who had autism and was non-verbal, whose undiagnosed dental pain led to his missing several years of school. He was left for two years with an undiagnosed dental abscess. His behaviour really deteriorated, but no one thought to look for what was causing that. His mother described him as having lost a significant part of his childhood. He missed a full two years as a result of the failure to diagnose that. I have had occasion to share a number of my reports with the professional bodies, particularly one on the inappropriate use of restraint on someone with a mental health issue. Furthermore, we have had a number of reports in which we have investigated the regulators, their undertaking of their role and a failure to do that properly. The complexity of those cases continues to come through, and it is really important that we have the resource to address that.

On complaint standards, we continue to implement the statutory complaints process. A number of members were present when we launched the health and social care one. We have now moved to all Departments and their 100 arm's-length bodies (ALBs). We are working with the head of the Civil Service and the permanent secretaries to get that in place. I expect that to be launched in early 2026, and to be effective from late summer to autumn 2026. It is my intention to have the complaint standards programme for all the sectors fully launched when I complete my term in summer 2027. We will move to housing and then education.

I hope that the Committee will have seen that we recently launched a new investigation into the Northern Ireland Housing Executive. In fact, we have had a series of meetings with the housing spokespeople from each of the parties to get their understanding of some of the issues. It was as a result of a substantial increase in the number of housing complaints that were being brought to the office. In fact, over the past three years, we have seen a 72% increase in housing complaints to the office, with most focused on the Housing Executive. The focus of our investigation is repairs responsiveness. It will look particularly at damp and mould, adaptations, delays and the standards in temporary accommodation. We will, of course, keep the Committee updated as we go through that.

The Committee will note that local government ethical standards (LGES) complaints have a tendency to fluctuate; there will be, on average, somewhere between 30 and 50 allegations in any given year. In this year to date, we have received 46 allegations, which, at this point, is higher than the average. As the Committee is aware, those allegations are against individual councillors, and, given that, we have worked really hard to ensure that they are dealt with in a timely manner because we understand the stress that that causes. I have provided the Committee with my paper on the targets and the case profile, and I am pleased to say that the case profile on those has not got any older and has continued to be good.

I will move on to our budget, if the Committee will allow. Like many other public bodies, NIPSO has faced significant budgetary pressures, many of which are inescapable. Our staff costs make up 82% of our budget, and, obviously, we need to respond to that. Our other inescapable costs are independent professional advice, which we have to use as our cases get more complex, and also our energy and IT costs.

I will bring this to the Committee's attention. You will see that we have indicated a 10% increase in our budget, and that was calculated against the figure that the Committee approved for us last year. However, you are probably aware that the Government increased employers' National Insurance contributions to 15%. As a result, NIPSO and other public bodies were given an additional amount in the June monitoring round to cover that. That amount was £100,000. So, in effect, our budget last year ended up at £5,050,000 rather than the £4,950,000 that the Committee approved for us. We have used the original figure to calculate the increase that we have asked for, which is just over 10%, and DOF has used the figure, including the National Insurance, which brings the figure down to 8·1%. I just wanted to draw that to your attention.

The majority of the increases, as set out in the paper, are £82,000 for staff progression; a budget for a cost-of-living rise of £127,000; and a request for some further posts totalling £164,000. I am mindful that the Committee has been very supportive of our work, and I am also mindful of where our public-sector finances are, so I just thought that I would explain to the Committee what those posts are for your consideration.

The first post is a lead officer post at stage 1 of our process. That is where those 1,300 or 1,700 complaints come through the door, and that is to increase the level of supervision for staff who are making those decisions at speed and also to ensure that they move more efficiently through our process.

The further two posts are focused at stage 3, which is the further investigation stage. The first one is an administrative post that is primarily focused on compliance. That post will be about following up with public bodies that have had a final report to ensure that they have not only undertaken what we asked of them but have actually provided us with the evidence of that. That approach will free up time for investigators who currently perform that role and will also make sure that it is done more efficiently. Hopefully, that will allow for an increased number of investigations and reports.

The second role at stage 3 is to provide additional supervision. I am sure that you will understand that it is particularly important for us to get those reports absolutely right and cover the detail of them. There is complex decision-making at that stage in our process. That will allow for more sign-off at draft report level and, hopefully, speed that up a little bit. The sign-off of draft reports, of which there were over 100 last year, currently sits with our director of investigations, who holds both stage 3 maladministration and LGES investigation roles, and the sheer volume, combined with the complexity, can cause a delay in the process. That is about us trying to move that along. I ask the Committee to give that its consideration.

I will bring one further thing to your attention before I close. There is a slight typo in the paper that we sent to you in the part about staff turnover. The turnover figure for 2024-25, which is on page 12, should actually be 18·1%. My apologies for that.

I am happy to answer any questions that the Committee has. Thank you for your ongoing interest in and support for our work. We very much appreciate that.

The Chairperson (Mr Chambers): Thank you, Margaret. I have a few questions. In your paper, you state that you anticipate a small underspend in this financial year due to delays in recruitment and implementation of the pay-and-grading exercise. What do you anticipate the level of underspend might be?

Mr Sean Martin (Northern Ireland Public Services Ombudsman): If anyone has been watching, they will know that we have been out quite a lot recently to fill the posts that have become vacant. We have set out a timeline for when we expect those posts to be filled and what the budgetary effects will be. On the basis of the steps that we have taken on our recruitment plans and what we currently know, we are thinking that it will be £100,000, give or take. We have quite a lot of uncertain expenditure, and that is based on not exceeding any other budget lines. Just on salaries, we are thinking somewhere around £100,000.

The Chairperson (Mr Chambers): Thanks for that. I note that you are not requesting a capital budget for the full period of the budget. Is that realistic?

Mr Martin: We have thought quite a lot about what we have historically spent capital on and whether we intend to do any of that work across the three-year period. We previously requested capital for a refurbishment of the building that we are in, and we do not intend to carry out any planned work on the building, having done that full refurbishment. The other thing that we had asked for capital for was our case-handling system, and we spent a couple of hundred thousand pounds, probably, in total, in capital on developing that case-handling system over a number of years. Our costs on the case-handling system are now revenue. They are licences, having developed it. We do not anticipate, with our level of investment in that, that we will change that case-handling system over the three-year period. It is something that we will have to think about when the current contract expires. We will have to consider whether it is still meeting our needs and whether there are alternatives on the market. Having been there when that case-handling system was implemented, I know that it not only had significant costs but took a significant amount of our time to shift all the data and get the reporting functionality out of the system. In our projections, we do not anticipate any capital spend. We think that it is realistic. Otherwise, we would just be putting a figure in the budget without any real knowledge of what we would be using it for.

Ms Forsythe: Thank you all for being here. Margaret and your team, there has been a lot of high-profile stuff coming out of the office. It is so, so important, and it is no surprise to see the increase in people reaching out to you with complaints because, clearly, you are doing a fantastic job, and everybody is seeing that coming through. It is a testament to your profile of professionalism that people are looking to you when feeling particularly frustrated with the system.

In a previous session, you mentioned that something like half of your complaints are to do with health. Is it still the same trend that your increase in workload tends to be more from health? That is to get an idea of the proportion of complaints that you receive.

Ms Kelly: I will have a quick look at the annual report and accounts. The number of health complaints has gone up because our numbers have gone up overall, but they have stayed at broadly the same percentage.

Mr Martin: Over the years, they have varied slightly, but, usually, they make up between 40% and 50%. Sometimes it is 42% and sometimes it is 46%, but they have stayed in that bracket for some time. The overall increase means that we are doing quite a bit of digging into our data to look for variations to see whether there is a particular sector that is driving that increase. Our analysis to date has not pointed to a particular sector being the issue. Margaret mentioned complaints about housing going up, and that is the case. Health has always been the highest area of work, and it remains so.

Ms Kelly: I have just checked that for you. We are currently working on the ombudsman's report. Health makes up 43% of complaints, which is broadly where it has been. It is not going down, so we are still getting an increase in complaints, but neither is it the reason for the overall increase.

Ms Forsythe: You gave a couple of examples, and we saw some of them in the public domain. There are some very tragic cases, and I am sure that it is very difficult for your staff to deal with those. What is the process for feeding back on those? Are you seeing improvements coming out of that or are you seeing the same serious, tragic things recurring? What is the measure for when you receive such a complaint, and it goes back into the system? The Audit Office gave evidence in the previous session. I am clear on its process in that, when its report goes out and the Public Accounts Committee takes it up, the recommendations are tracked. What is your process for that?

Ms Kelly: We track our recommendations. Health is a big system, so we sometimes pick up on one bit, and say, "We see this and this", and, often, the trust will say, "That is an individual ward", or, "That has been an individual service". We sometimes see improvements across the board, but, in truth, we also see recurrent issues of complaint. I have started work on a case digest on identifying sepsis, because we have seen that as a theme, and we have started to pull reports together to present the trends.

When it comes to significant shift in health, however, we get that shift at the level of individuals and on some of the themes, but we are part of a cultural and systemic shift that has to come. Health will always put in place our recommendations, but we do not always see that across the board. You know as well as I do that, in many respects, health trusts operate individually. When we do a report for one health trust, other trusts do not necessarily pick that up.

I am about to issue a report on one area in which we have seen a system shift. We did a report on communication with people on healthcare waiting lists. That was significant, because people were on waiting lists for years, and we called the report 'Forgotten' because the vast majority of those people said that that was how they felt. I am about to publish the follow-up report, and we have seen a real shift at system level in how people are communicated with, which has been positive. Is there more work to do on that, Diane? There absolutely is. I could not say otherwise.

Ms Forsythe: I look forward to seeing the follow-up report. Ultimately, we want to see the output of the work. Did you say that your piece on the complaint standards programme will be launched in 2027?

Ms Kelly: Yes. We have introduced that across Health and Social Care, including all family practitioner services — GPs and dentists — and all the trusts. That is in place, and we will monitor it. We have produced lots of resources to support organisations. Every public-sector body should be in the programme by summer 2027. We are working on the Departments and the ALBs; that is our next step.

Ms Forsythe: Thank you very much.

Mr Blair: If I may, Chair, I will move away from the bare statistics in the report — the facts and figures and the pounds and pence — to what you said about investigating regulators, and I will ask about the resource implications of that. Are there occasions on which you investigate a complaint about a service provider and, as a result of the investigation, find a problem with the regulator, which increases the level and detail of your investigation and is bound to have resource implications for you? I will stretch the question a bit: how do you forecast that?

Mr Martin: I will start by setting the context. In the government system, there are lots of regulators, from councils, which have a lot of regulatory powers at a local level, to the Northern Ireland Environment Agency, and there are others that you might not think about as having regulatory roles. We did a report about the role, at a certain point, of the Department for the Economy in regulating insolvency practitioners. There is lots of regulatory activity across local and central government. At times, when we have looked at a regulator's systems and processes, we have made recommendations for improvement, and we have seen failings.

Our work in that area has largely been complaint-driven, so we are thinking about the possibility of doing an own-initiative (OI) investigation into a particular aspect of regulation in order to look at it more systemically. In looking at how some regulators have fulfilled their statutory obligations and whether they have followed their policies and procedures, we have found failures to follow those procedures and made recommendations for improvement. That is not about one specific regulator but covers a range of regulatory activities.

Those are captured in our broader numbers. We do not pull them out as a sector, because they are spread across government, local government and things that you might not know exist. The Health and Safety Executive for Northern Ireland comes to mind as another one about which we have had a number of complaints over the years as to how it has conducted its regulatory activity. There is a range of regulators, and we get complaints across that broad range.

Ms Kelly: I said that we are getting more complex complaints. The complexity comes in when, for example, we get complaints about regulators. The complaint about how the Civil Service regulated insolvency practitioners was hugely complex. It took some time to do. To be fair, there are lessons in that about how we could have done a slightly better job at drawing it out across the system. While that complaint was about how the Civil Service dealt with insolvency regulation, the underlying theme was about how, when you have generalist services with specific regulatory responsibilities, you ensure that there are enough specialists to understand those in order to ensure that regulation is in place. To be honest, John, we take that as being part and parcel of our ongoing work.

Mr Blair: Are there occasions on which a reporter's complaint about a service provider leads you to a regulator because something has not been regulated properly and that has led to a gap or fault in service provision?

Ms Kelly: Probably less so.

Mr Martin: For us to enter and begin the process, there has to be a complaint against a public organisation. We have some discretion, but, to be fair to public bodies, we usually expect them to have had the opportunity to respond to the issues. They may well accept that they have got things wrong.

Mr Blair: There are bound to be resource implications, if you are led somewhere else when you are in the middle of a report.

Mr Martin: Absolutely.

Ms Kelly: That has become part and parcel of our work. There is another difficulty that we need to focus on. My term as ombudsman completes in summer 2027. By that point, the office will be looking at 2,000 complaints. That is a sizeable number. We are also looking at our processes and at how we can put things in place to make sure that we respond efficiently and effectively. When I say to the Committee that certain posts would be really helpful for us, that is about us trying to ensure that. We cannot keep coming and asking for more and more investigation staff. We also have to make sure that how we are doing our work is proportionate and effective. That is why what I have asked for has focused not on additional investigators but on things that will make sure that we move complaints through our system and that we are being as proportionate as possible.

As you will know, given how things are at the minute, there is any number of OI investigations or complaint investigations that I could do, but we have to have some way of prioritising that. Even the housing own-initiative investigation was driven by seeing a real increase in the number of complaints and some really significant housing complaints, particularly around antisocial behaviour, its impact and the failure to deal with it not simply by the Housing Executive but across housing associations. Making those judgements and setting priorities is a balance for us.

Mr Blair: Thank you.

Mr Martin: John, we see that extension of scope in Health and Social Care in particular, because you can have movement between GPs and hospitals, maybe from A&E to inpatient care and out to care homes. Sometimes, a patient complains about their journey, so one investigation can look at three or four bodies.

Mr Blair: That is what I was getting at. Thank you, Sean.

Mr Mathison: Thank you for your presentation. The rise in the number of complaints largely makes your case on the need for increased budget, notwithstanding what you said about your internal efficiencies. That is significant.

I want to pick up on the pay and grading review. When you last presented to us, a big feature of the budget ask was for that to be delivered. Now that that is in place, you are still looking at a potential 17% staff turnover. Has that had the impact that you hoped that it would have? How can we avoid the risk of needing to revisit whether your staffing costs are appropriately resourced, if you are to be competitive in the market and able to retain staff?

Mr Martin: In preparation for coming before the Committee, I looked at who we lost over that period and at the projections. Projections based on five months' turnover could be massively under or over. Slightly over half of the posts that we lost this year were investigators. Some of those were lost very early in the year, and some of them may have been lost before the introduction of the pay and grading review. There are others who are recruiting for the same skills as us, and I do not think that we could come back to the Committee to ask for the increase that would be needed to match the salaries that they offer. We need to highlight some of the wider benefits of working for us, not just the salary, when recruiting and in trying to retain staff. As part of the pay and grading review, people move to the bottom of their scale. All our staff, bar a couple, are at the bottom of their scale and can progress within NIPSO. Most staff will have another three, if not four, years of progression. We hope that that will help us to retain staff.

In some of our past submissions to the Committee, Margaret has highlighted the fact that the age profile of our workforce has changed so that it includes more early-career people. We have very capable people, who get really good experience with us. A bit of new blood, energy and enthusiasm is a good thing, but the level of turnover that we have experienced can be disruptive. I do not know what will happen. We are still hopeful. We are not saying that it has not worked — it is early days — but we hope that we have pitched it right.

Ms Kelly: Ombudspersons' offices across the UK have had staff turnover. Quite a number of them have hubs in Belfast now. That is, of course, good for Belfast, but it is not quite so good for us. There are additional opportunities for people, and I hope that we have pitched it right.

Mr Mathison: May I ask another question, Chair?

The Chairperson (Mr Chambers): Yes, if it is succinct.

Mr Mathison: I will keep it succinct.

You are saying that you are confident that you have done all that you can in staff retention. Ultimately, however, if you want to run a robust complaints-handling process, you clearly need to resource it.

Ms Kelly: We have done all that we can with pay and grading. Pay and grading is in the right spot. There are always things that can be done on culture and support, and we continue to do those things. I would say, however, that that is ongoing work in any organisation.

The Chairperson (Mr Chambers): We are racing against the clock. I will ask a quick question that is outside the scope of budget. We touched on cases that you investigate, some of which must be very harrowing and disturbing. Do you have processes in place to protect the well-being of investigators who have to deal with those disturbing cases?

Mr Martin: We do, Alan. Your description is absolutely right. We have done some work on that. Our ombudsman colleagues in the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman (PHSO) have done a lot of work with their staff. They deal with that day in, day out, because over 80% of their workload is in health, whereas we have a broader spread.

Ms Kelly: It is trauma informed. We have employee assistance, but we also had a programme to look at trauma-informed work, and PHSO colleagues have come over to deliver a number of workshops for staff. That is about having somebody to supervise, oversee and know those traumatic cases on an ongoing basis.

Mr Martin: There is stuff in our processes to allow people to take a bit of time out if they have been dealing with a particularly traumatic case. They are not expected to be straight back on the phone for front-end call handling, where somebody will be explaining their story. There is an allowance. We brought in a call-recording system for those front-end calls. All the investigators are on call recording, but we have built in an allowance for the staff who take front-end calls so that they can step back and indicate that they need to take a wee bit of time out. Margaret is right that we have an employee assistance programme of which staff can avail themselves. It is the central government-procured employee assistance programme. In addition to that, we have done that other work.

Ms Kelly: We try to have balance. I see every single one of the further investigation reports; none of them goes out unless I have seen them — not unless I have seen what the complainant said, seen what the public body said and read the full investigation. Some of them are really harrowing. For us, it is always about finding a balance between empathy for an individual who has had a really hard time, making sure that our findings are right, and supporting the employees.

The Chairperson (Mr Chambers): I am sorry that I took you outside the scope of the budget —

Ms Kelly: Not at all.

The Chairperson (Mr Chambers): — but I thought that it was an important question to ask. It was quite a reassuring answer.

Thank you very much indeed for your presentation this morning. Again, I place on record our appreciation for the work that you do on behalf of the public.

Ms Kelly: Thank you very much.