Social Care Ombudsman received 44 complaints and enquiries about Bedford Borough Council last year

Forty-four complaints and enquiries about Bedford Borough Council, were received by the Local Government Social Care Ombudsman last year, councillors heard.

The council’s portfolio holder for adult services, councillor Dean Crofts, told the Adult Services Overview and Scrutiny Committee (Tuesday, October 18) that from this total the Ombudsman (LGO) upheld three adult social care complaints.

The Ombudsman defines ‘upheld’ as complaints where it has decided that an authority has been at fault in how it acted and that this fault may or may not have caused an injustice to the complainant, or where an authority has accepted that it needs to remedy the complaint before it makes a finding on fault.

“We use [the complaints] as learning exercises to put best practice into place, if it’s not there already, so the service for our users improves,” the LibDems councillor for Kingsbrook said.

“The annual review does not highlight any significant concerns from the Ombudsman regarding our adult social care service.

“And the Ombudsman was a hundred percent satisfied in the way that we had handled [its] recommendations.

“Some of these complaints do relate to things that happened in 2019 and 2020, but they got to the Ombudsman in the year of 21/22.

“So it can sometimes take up to three years in our residents’ journey to get a resolution.

“And in these three instances it did unfortunately not go the way it should have,” he said.

Councillor Crofts added these three complaints came from a period where 2,600 to 2,900 residents were using adult social care services.

“Complaints nationally in the adult social care sector are higher last year,” councillor Crofts added.

“And the LGO issued a statement actually last week stating that the reason for that are the pressures that every adult social care department faces in dealing with the complexity with the resources that we have.”

Ashok Khandelwal, an independent observer of the committee from Healthwatch Bedford, asked if there was a “lessons learned” exercise to prevent these issues in the future.

Kate Walker, the council’s director of adults’ services, said: “A separate report on complaints comes to the committee later in the year.

“And in that we show the lessons learned and the feedback that’s also carried out through the service.”