Dear Mr Carruthers
Further to your request 1949-1fcaa055 received by Boston Borough Council on Saturday 23 August.
The Council’s complaints process is detailed in the flyer enclosed with this reply. As you will see, our process does not involve councillors directly resolving complaints against Council staff. Our process is for the complaint to be received by the Council’s Complaints Team, for that to be investigated by an appointed investigating officer and for the complainant to have the right to appeal by writing to our Chief Executive, Mick Gallagher.
In terms of complaints submitted to the Council please see table below:
2005/06 / 2006/07 / 2007/08Number of complaints / 52 / 65 / 55
Number of complaints justified / 13 / 20 / 5 (fully justified)
6 (partly justified)
Number of people removed from the Council as a result of a grievance / 0 / 0 / 0
As per our complaints process outlined in the flyer these complaints would not normally be considered by an elected representative.
Of the complaints listed above I have specified the number of complaints which were found to be justified – but again I must stress that this was not determined by elected Councillors.
Turning to your query about the number of staff who are no longer employed by our authority as a result of a complaint I have contacted our Human Resources Department and listed the number of staff where a grievance was found to be upheld which resulted in the employee losing their post. They have no record of any member of staff being dismissed as a result of a complaint.
Further I am not able to provide individual details of compensation agreed where a complaint was found to be justified, due to Data Protection. However, I can provide a total amount that was agreed and this shows the total agreed either in the form of a local settlement or additional formal finding of maladministration causing injustice (see table below).
2005/06 / 2006/07 / 2007/08Total compensation agreed (local settlement) / 0 / 0 / £1575
Total compensation agreed (finding of maladministration causing injustice) / 0 / 0 / 0
Where the LGO has found maladministration the LGO’s recommendations have been met in full. As to whether this amount was met from Council Tax payers, the Council’s funds are made up from the following sources:
- Non Domestic Rates 18%
- Fees and Charges – 19%
- Grants – 50%
- Council Tax - %
- RSG – 3%
(The % breakdown relates to the Council’s budget for 2008-09).
It is not possible to say out of which particular funding stream the money would have been paid from, only to say that it would have been met by the service budget which is funded from these sources.
Complaints are administered as part of the Council’s Communications Service. Complaints does not have a separate budget coding but is administered as part of the overall Communications service.
However, we have calculated the cost of our complaints system as part of our zero-based budgeting exercise in 2007-08 and our estimate – for complaints excluding FOI and DP – was £6,277 – this was an estimate based on staff time spent administrating the process. In terms of the number of staff involved there are 2.5 full time equivalent staff working in Communications overall and these posts all deal with complaints – but not all of their working time.
With regard to your request for information about the pay increase made to the Council’s Chief Executive in pounds sterling for each of these years we would only provide the pay scale that the Chief Executive was paid, and not the detail of his wage increases.
The Council is currently controlled by the Boston Bypass Independent Party which came to power in May 2007. The council’s Electoral Registration and Returning Officer were already in post.
Yours sincerely
Richard Steele
Information Security and Business Services Principal.