County council complaints double

In its annual letter to the county council, the Local Government Ombudsman says it received 102 complaints about the local authority for the 12 months between March 31, 2006, and the end of March 2007.

This was a rise of 62 complaints with adult care service, education and transport and highways coming under particular attack from the public.

In the letter Anne Seex, who is the ombudsman who regulates complaints against councils, said: "While I do not draw any conclusions from it (the rise in complaints), in light of the profile of the types of complaint, I urge your council to consider whether it needs to review the processes of any of its departments.

"I appreciate the absolute numbers are quite small, and no conclusions about trends or quality of services can be drawn purely from the data."

At a cabinet meeting last week, the council defended its position and said the number of complaints were in-line with other authorities of similar size such as Kent, which had 148 complaints and Essex, which had 98.

A breakdown of the main areas of complaint against LCC were 21 over adult care; 20 relating to children and family services; 29 about education; 18 regarding highways and transport and three over planning and building control.

The LGO said it was happy with the council's response to the majority of complaints which on average took approximately 28 days.

The report of the LCC cabinet meeting states: "One explanation for this increase is likely to be that both the children and young people and adult and community directorates are now taking an active approach to informing service users of their opportunity to refer issues to the ombudsman, and this is no doubt now being reflected in the figures.

"In a further discussion with the Ombudsman about this issue, it was conceded that an increase in the number of complaints can be viewed as a positive in that it indicates that our complaints processes are clear, easy to use and working well."