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Role of the independent scrutineer

'The role of the independent scrutineer: ensuring effective public accountability' Speech by Ann Abraham - Centre for Public Scrutiny annual lecture 25 January 2005.

PowerPoint slides to accompany the speech (199KB)

The Introduction

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Ombudsmen like clarity – so I’m going to start by defining some terms.  What do we mean by scrutiny; who can we include in this group called ‘independent scrutineers’; and what are the hallmarks of good scrutiny?

I’ll go on to ask why does scrutiny matter?  What’s the importance of the independent scrutineer? And, does our current system of scrutiny work? In other words, are we - me, my ombudsman colleagues and other independent scrutineers - getting scrutiny right?

That, of course, raises the question of what roles the various independent scrutineers play and how they work together. Parliament, Ombudsmen, auditors, inspectors, regulators, the voluntary sector and the media all play their part in calling public bodies to account, in encouraging better quality services and in building institutions that everyone can trust.

Whilst I may be biased, I firmly believe that Ombudsmen play a key role, not just as independent scrutineers but as agents of change. We have a key role in developing principles of good administration and in helping to improve public services. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the work of my Office I’ll say a bit about what we do and the role Ombudsmen play in ensuring effective public accountability.

I’m sure I’m not the only person here who finds the public scrutiny landscape a confused and confusing place – and one where the routes to redress can appear rather haphazard and rocky at times. If I find it a bewildering place after all these years of navigating the maze of public service providers, of regulators, commissioners, Ombudsmen, and others – goodness only knows what the average citizen approaching all of this for the first time manages to make of it.  How can we – the scrutineers - make sense of this landscape for the user?

And finally – because surely scrutiny is a means to an end rather than an end in itself: How can better scrutiny improve the quality and credibility of public services?

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Defining scrutiny

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So what do we mean by public scrutiny?

The Centre for Public Scrutiny provides a helpful definition. According to its Scrutiny Map, which charts the increasing number and variety of bodies now involved in public scrutiny:

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In other words the fundamental purpose of public scrutiny is that one body undertakes a process of critically examining the operations and activities of another, on behalf of the broader public affected by the body under scrutiny. As Professor Sir Ian Kennedy pointed out in his speech to CfPS last year, public scrutiny is one of those generic terms which means a lot of things to people who know what it means, but it's not always as clear to the outsider. 

He described it as meaning four things: scrutiny by the public, scrutiny of public bodies, scrutiny in public, and scrutiny in the interests of the public.

Using the CfPS definition of scrutiny, I can list a huge number of bodies involved in scrutiny – Parliament, the courts, tribunals, ombudsmen, regulators, auditors, inspectors and so on.  My focus will be on Ombudsmen – naturally – that’s what I know most about. But Ombudsmen don’t operate in isolation – they work alongside others: regulators, auditors etc – and in my case Parliament - and they provide an alternative dispute resolution mechanism to the courts – and I would say in many ways a better one – because of the significant contribution they make to improving public services.

I had something of a debate with myself about the role of the courts and tribunals as scrutineers.  In one sense of course they are – they determine the law and people’s entitlements.  But the link between determining the law in an individual case – and putting things right – both retrospectively for anyone else who has experienced the same problem – and avoiding similar problems recurring in future – can sometimes be pretty hit and miss. 

We may come back to that in debate – but for now I’m going to focus on those organisations which have an impact on improving public services such as ombudsmen, regulators, auditors and Parliament.

So, looking at this specific group, what might the hallmarks – the distinctive characteristics - of good scrutiny include?

Good scrutiny should, above all, be customer-focused and take the public interest as its starting point. The aim should be to develop a range of policies and services that, as far as possible, help people to avoid problems and disputes in the first place.

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As scrutineers our perspective must be that of the public and the public interest. Rather than just reflecting public concerns I would argue that – whether we’re involved in drafting new legislation or in looking at service delivery – or in trying to put things right when they have gone wrong – we need to keep asking ourselves one simple question: Does this work for the customer?

In talking about public scrutiny and public accountability I’ll be using the two somewhat interchangeably. Accountability – the ability to call public officials to account and have them answer for their policies, actions, and use of funds – is fundamental in ensuring effective public scrutiny. We can’t subject public bodies to critical examination unless we have clear accountability.

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Why does scrutiny matter and does it work?

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So why does scrutiny matter?

Because it’s about trust.

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We – as members of the public - expect our publicly-funded bodies to be accountable – and for our governments, elected representatives, and publicly-funded institutions to explain fully and fairly, how they are carrying out responsibilities that affect us in important ways. And, we expect there to be the mechanisms and procedures in place to expose administrative errors and government mistakes.

Of course, no system will ever be perfect, which is why we need scrutiny. And the broader the reach of public policy becomes, the more we need a considered approach to making and implementing policy -  and effective and accessible appeal mechanisms for when things go wrong.

We already have an elaborate public sector accountability and scrutiny framework. Access to information, departmental reports to Parliament, appearances of ministers and officials before Parliamentary committees, audit, evaluation and compliance reports, reports of official watchdogs, public inquiries – they’re all part of a rather patchy network which needs some attention if it’s to become joined-up, customer-focused and fully effective.

The scrutiny landscape has changed radically in the last 40 years contributing to the rise of new institutions - such as Ombudsmen. In addition to this change we’ve also seen a cultural – and legislative shift towards greater openness and transparency in government. As the full force of the Freedom of Information Act comes into play it will be interesting to observe the impact this has on accountability.

The last 40 years have also seen a major shift in consumers’ expectations and demands of public services.  It looks something like this:

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Increased education, an explosion in the amount of information available - and new ways to access and share that information mean that the public is better informed than ever before.

The Citizen’s Charter, despite its limitations, made a real impact in encouraging consumers to challenge decisions and to expect public bodies to be user friendly.

But whilst consumers have higher expectations, at the same time research shows that they feel disconnected from the way their taxes are being spent and from the political process itself.

[Source: Paying for Progress: A New Politics of Tax for Public Spending, Fabian Society, November 200 – report of the independent commission on taxation and citizenship, established by the Fabian Society and chaired by Raymond Plant.]

For scrutiny to work, the public need much clearer information on what they can expect from public services. 

As Tony Wright said in another Fabian Society publication last year, ‘People are entitled to know what they can expect for the money they pay for their public services, in as precise a way as possible, and to know what happens if such expectations are not fulfilled.’

[Source: A New Social Contract:  From targets to rights in public services. Tony Wright and Pauline Ngan, March 2004]

The Citizen’s Charter showed that real public service reform involves users knowing what the state promises to deliver. Tony makes a compelling argument to build on that, in a more systematic way, with Public Service Guarantees spelling out users’ entitlements and providing explicit guarantees about what services will provide.

Clear accountability and effective scrutiny are key factors in building trust in public institutions. But, with the range of serious and long-running news stories highlighting failings in public services – it’s perhaps no wonder that trust in public institutions is declining.

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The level of trust individuals have in public services will affect their use and engagement with those services and impact, ultimately, on public willingness to engage with the political process itself.  Only when a service works well and is perceived to be fair can it earn public trust.

The Child Support Agency, for example, has been dogged by problems ever since its inception. Research by the Social Policy Research Unit for the Department for Work and Pensions [Customer Views on Service Delivery in the Child Support Agency, by Sandra Hutton, Jane Carlisle and Anne Corden (Research Report No. 74) Department for Work and Pensions, March 1998)] found that, although absent parents tended to agree in principle with the CSA’s aims, there was a perception that it pursued 'soft targets’ and lacked even-handedness in ensuring that all absent parents paid maintenance.

None of the parents surveyed were able to explain fully how their assessment had been calculated and many wanted to know the details of the formula that was used to calculate awards.

Last year my Office received 222 complaints about the Agency, an increase of 5% on the previous year. As in earlier years, common themes from complaints included failure to pursue effective enforcement, delay and mishandling, failure to keep customers informed and compensation issues. Added to this the CSA’s new computer system, rolled out in 2003, has been beset with problems – leading to yet more media stories and a further erosion of public trust in the Agency.

Whilst building trust takes a long time, my Office, and other independent scrutineers, do play an important role in raising the public’s trust in public bodies.  The key thing is that my Office is independent.  Our own public awareness research may tell us that we have some way to go in raising awareness of the Ombudsman (we’re working on that) – but those who have heard of us invariably describe us as ‘independent’.

This next slide provides some useful pointers to what influences trust.  Independence features here, alongside service delivery – but so do honesty, listening, governance – and how we respond to mistakes – fertile ground for Ombudsmen.

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Does our system of scrutiny does work? 

Let me give you a few illustrations of the Ombudsman as scrutineer.

Famously, the activities of the Australian Commonwealth and Armed Forces Ombudsman were once described (by the Australian Senate Standing Committee on Finance and Public Administration) as ‘fly swatting and only rarely lion-hunting’.  But as one of my predecessors, Sir William Reid, once said ‘occasionally there will be lions to hunt as well’.

Indeed – at the risk of coming under fire from supporters of the Word Wildlife Fund - I might go further and suggest that, from time to time, it could even be appropriate to indulge in a spot of jungle clearance. 

My predecessors, albeit fairly quietly and modestly, have done some memorable lion hunting over the years. Ombudsman scholars among you are sure to have heard of the Sachsenhausen case in which Sir Edmund Compton castigated the Foreign Office for their refusal to pay the compensation claims of a number of British citizens imprisoned at Sachsenhausen, a concentration camp near Berlin, on the grounds that there was no clear evidence that they had been ‘victims of Nazi persecution’.

In 1989 Sir Anthony Barrowclough’s report of his investigation into the Barlow Clowes financial scandal led – eventually – to payment of a total of some £150 million in compensation to thousands of investors.

Then there was the State Earnings Related Pension Scheme (SERPS) where the results of a representative sample of investigations from over three hundred complaints gave redress for maladministration to hundreds of thousands of married couples who had planned for their financial future on the basis of incorrect information disseminated by the then Department of Social Security.

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And coming up right to date, let me give you an example from my recent experience as Health Service Ombudsman for England.

In February 2003, I laid before Parliament and published a special report on NHS funding of long term care. 

Many of you will be aware of the distinction that is made between people requiring clinical - nursing/medical care - and those requiring personal or social care such as help in getting out of bed, dressing and feeding themselves etc. The distinction matters. Clinical care is entirely funded by the NHS whereas personal or social care is means tested.  A number of complaints to the Ombudsman from patients about their assessments refusing NHS funded care suggested to us that there was a widespread problem in the application of the criteria and rules in making these – admittedly difficult - judgements. 

It appeared that some disabled, frail or elderly people had been denied funding of their health care and accommodation by the NHS and had paid for means tested services arranged by their local authority.

We used a small number of cases to demonstrate the point to Parliament.   The report received extensive media coverage. 

We called for a retrospective review – recommending that the health bodies concerned should trace those people who might have been affected, review their circumstances and, where justified, make restitution, and that the Department of Health should guide and support them in that work.

Over 11,000 cases have been or are being reviewed.  The Department of Health has stated that the NHS expects to pay a total of £180 million in restitution to people wrongly denied funding.

But it didn’t end there.  Since February 2003 we have received some 4,000 further complaints about continuing care.  Our analysis of these complaints showed how many complainants, when applying for funding for long-term care, had suffered from a lengthy and hit and miss process.  We published a further report.

In the second report we highlighted the need for clear, national, minimum eligibility criteria - understandable to health professionals and patients and carers alike. The Department of Health have now taken this on board and we will be pursuing it with them, with the help of the Health Select Committee and others.

So scrutiny by Ombudsmen can and does work – and the authority and influence that Ombudsmen can bring to bear – alongside Parliamentarians who also expressed considerable interest in the continuing care issues, and also in this case the media, can provide a powerful combination of scrutineers. 

Which brings me to my next question: 

Why do we need a range of independent scrutineers?

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For a long time we’ve looked to Parliament - and ministerial responsibility - to secure accountability, rather than relying on other bodies such as Ombudsmen and auditors. So why do we now need such a wide network of independent scrutineers?

As I’ve hinted, part of that must lie in the growing complexity of the modern state, the cultural shift towards greater openness and transparency and changing public expectations towards decision makers.

The landscape has changed, customers expectations have shifted and – perhaps - the relationship between Parliament and the Executive has changed?

I don’t think it’s controversial to suggest that the Government commands the majority of Parliament’s time.  But this can mean  that Parliament is not always able to act as a totally effective counterbalance to the wide discretionary powers of the Executive. In response, new organisations, such as Ombudsmen, have been developed to balance the Executive.  Indeed, when the office of Parliamentary Ombudsman was set up, its purpose was widely described as to assist Parliament in holding the Executive to account.

But executive decision makers and non-executive scrutineers should be complementary parts of the system – not opposite camps.

Some time ago a rather worrying theoretical banana skin was thrown my way by a permanent secretary who professed to being unable to define the boundary between good administration and good policymaking.

Good government and good public services need both. Government policies set a generic standard for services rather than specifying in detail how they are to be delivered – it’s for public bodies to fill in the detail. But, carefully considered and well-informed policymaking makes this process easier for public bodies. It also reduces the amount of work my Office needs to do when things go wrong.

Too often we have a sticking-plaster approach. Rushed and hasty legislation is introduced with not enough consideration and consultation – leading to flawed services, unhappy customers and an increase in our workload as we try to look for ways to remedy the problem.  Tax credits and child support are two recent examples that come to mind.

The system works much better when executive decision-makers and non-executive scrutineers work openly and constructively together, both in the development and the implementation of legislation, to identify and resolve problems in the public interest – before they turn into poor service delivery – and complaints to me.

But my Office can’t resolve issues alone. We can highlight problems to Government but often real progress can only be made through the joint efforts of policy makers, service deliverers, the courts and non-executive scrutineers such as Ombudsmen.

It was a Court of Appeal judgment - the Coughlan case in 1999 – that formed the foundation for the work my Office did on NHS funding for long term care.  That judgment clarified the law.  And, after our report was published, a Parliamentary Select Committee pressed the Department of Health to publish figures on their progress with carrying out the retrospective reviews.

Similarly a House of Lords decision was the starting point for a special report from the English Local Government Ombudsman, which secured compensation for significant numbers of people, from local authorities that had failed to pay for the aftercare of people discharged from compulsory detention in mental hospitals.

In these cases local authorities had either charged for this aftercare, frequently in specialist residential accommodation, or required people to arrange and pay for their own care.

The House of Lords ruling, in July 2002, that social services authorities were required to pay for aftercare, didn’t consider the position of those wrongly charged over the years, but the Local Government Ombudsman pursued this issue in its 2003 special report, which urged social services authorities to seek out those who had been wrongly made to pay - and make restitution.

By the end of 2004 over 800 cases had been identified and £11.6 million reimbursed.

The LGO estimates at least 2,371 more people are likely to come forward, for which the local authorities are budgeting around £45 million.

Both these special reports from Ombudsmen illustrate the way in which the courts, non-executive scrutineers and executive decision makers, can work together to remedy injustice and effect change.

My Office has an important – and particular – role to play in working alongside Parliament.

As Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman I work particularly closely with the Public Administration Select Committee but I also maintain contact work with other select committees – such as Health and Work and Pensions – with an interest in our work.

I wouldn’t say that my double act with the Public Administration Select Committee is exactly good cop, bad cop but it does work.  I prefer to think that we are both perfectly reasonable and empathetic cops with just a touch of menace!

I can help the Committee by highlighting problem areas and providing some evidence of what is happening on the ground and how it affects the individuals they are in Parliament to represent. I’ve also been called as a witness in their investigations into these issues and, on occasion, have moved to the other side of the table to support the Committee.

For example, last year I joined the Committee at their side of the table when they were questioning the Chief Medical Officer and the Chairman of the Healthcare Commission about reforms to the NHS complaints procedure. I am currently preparing a special report on the NHS complaints system, highlighting weaknesses in the current arrangements and making recommendations for improvement.  I hope we can work with both PASC and the Health Select Committee to ensure our recommendations are acted on.

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My Office’s relationship with PASC is mutually supportive. I can help the Committee and they can certainly help me in defending my independence and promoting my role.

One of the regular criticisms of my Office is that we don’t do enough of our work in public – that we don’t shout loudly or often enough about what it is we’re doing.

But conducting investigations that are thorough, rigorous and fair takes time.   We need to look at both sides of the argument, talking regularly to both the complainant and the key people in the body under scrutiny – all of which means we can’t talk to the media before the results of our investigations are available.

Whilst we’re conducting our investigations it can be irritating to see some of the more broad-brush or one-sided media reports – especially when they cause more confusion to complainants. However, I do think the media plays an important role in the scrutiny network in ensuring issues remain visible and in encouraging complainants to come forward.

In our work on continuing care, regular media coverage has been helpful. It’s encouraged a wide range of complainants to come forward – giving us a good idea of the extent of the problem and ensuring all those affected can secure a just outcome.

As an Ombudsman I’m content to leave the shouting to the media – we work best when we talk softly but carry a big stick.

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What role can ombudsmen play in ensuring effective public accountability?

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the Ombudsman community, it may be useful to explain briefly what Ombudsmen do and how we fit into the public scrutiny network.

In the UK there are 16 ombudsman schemes recognised by the British and Irish Ombudsman Association. Of these eight are public sector ombudsmen. We are appointed rather than elected and we are all involved in investigating complaints about whether the bodies within our jurisdiction have handled things properly and fairly.

I actually wear two hats - one as the Parliamentary Ombudsman for the UK and the other as the Health Service Ombudsman for England. As Parliamentary Ombudsman my remit runs across all the UK departments of state and the bodies that are sponsored by each to undertake specific actions on their behalf.

This runs into hundreds of bodies whose names, structures and very existence mutate faster than a genetically modified crop in a laboratory test tube. A fact that causes us frequent problems in ensuring our stated jurisdiction is kept up-to-date as the machinery of government changes. That’s an area of scrutiny in its own right – keeping the jurisdiction up to date.

My statutory duty is to investigate complaints about unremedied injustice as a result of maladministration.

We prefer to use words that are more easily understood - like acting properly and fairly - in our Role and Purpose statement.

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Part of the effectiveness of Ombudsman services lies in the model of complaint handling we have adopted – the inquisitorial process. Recently, there’s been a realisation that in resolving disputes the inquisitorial approach can be rather more effective and economical than the traditional court or tribunal adversarial model. Ombudsmen on the whole don’t need hearings. We don’t need complainants to be represented by lawyers. Our authority entitles us to go straight to the evidence we know to be relevant. And we are accessible, particularly by virtue of being a free service.

Ombudsmen – in providing a free, impartial and accessible appeal mechanism – are surely an important element in ensuring effective public accountability. There is increasing interest in how the Ombudsman model of alternative dispute resolution can be used more widely and I think we have a good story to tell.

Over the last 35 years the roles of the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman have grown and changed along with the rest of society.

In handling complaints we have gone from the reactive, handspun, tailor-made individual investigation with individual resolution through to the more proactive and strategic casework which can look at small numbers of cases as an exemplar for wider issues.

This change is in line with what our customers want. Our perspective must always be the public and the public interest. With that in mind we recently commissioned some stakeholder research among complainants, complaint handlers and senior stakeholders to find out what they thought about our role and what they value about our service.

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Clearly the public values our role in improving public services and they see us as a fair and independent voice in handling their complaints.

We also asked how they would like to see our role develop.  That produced some interesting results – with complainants and advisory bodies keen to see us taking a proactive, recommendatory role.  Senior stakeholders – such as permanent secretaries and senior managers in the NHS were less keen.

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In order to put an issue behind them complainants must feel that the complaint has been ‘put right’ and that they have not been disadvantaged. The research shows that the public values our ability to find appropriate and imaginative remedies.

My Office can have a lot of clout. People think hard about errors when they have to pay a financial penalty or when they face the prospect of being called before a select committee to explain their organisation’s failings. A range of remedies for redress is an important element in ensuring effective scrutiny.

However, as an Ombudsman I’m clear that any remedy needs to be appropriate and proportionate to the injustice. It should, as far as possible, put the complainant in the position he or she would have been in but for the maladministration.  Ombudsmen have a range of remedies at their disposal.

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Inevitably, in some cases financial compensation may be the only available approach.

Much work still remains to be done on the issue of financial redress.  I’m still bewildered by the different attitudes to redress across the public sector:  from local government where it appears to be understood and accepted; to central government where it is accepted – but somewhat grudgingly much of the time; to the NHS where it feels like pulling teeth – literally.

PASC did some very good work on maladministration and redress some 10 years ago now - that I’ve recently been re-reading.  I think it’s probably time we looked at this again.

How can we make sense of the public scrutiny ‘landscape’?

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Although I’ve highlighted a few issues and problem areas, I’d argue that Ombudsmen are really pretty good at making findings of maladministration and ensuring appropriate remedies are actually delivered. We’re also getting smarter at ensuring lessons are learnt and services are improved for the future.

But, there are so many bodies involved in the scrutiny network and so many areas of overlapping remits. If we look at health and social care for instance, there’s the Commission for Social Care Inspection, the General Medical Council, the Health and Safety Executive, the National Patient Safety Agency, the Healthcare Commission, the Audit Commission and my Office to name but a few – all of which need to work together in a joined up and effective way.

Existing systems of redress don’t take people’s problems as a whole. Instead they break them down into types and generally insist that people analyse what sort of redress they need and choose the appropriate route. As the recent White Paper on Administrative Justice from the DCA comments:

‘It is rather as if a travel agent insisted on knowing whether you want to go by aeroplane, train or ferry before asking what your destination is.’

Often we see legislators’ very good intentions to simplify and improve systems start to unravel. The Health and Social Care Act 2003 for example was laudable in its intentions – note the joined up title - but it has not yet succeeded in putting in place a clear, workable system for dissatisfied customers.

The Healthcare Commission is within my jurisdiction as both Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsmen.  But one of the effects of the 2003 Act is to require a complainant who is unhappy about the handling of his or her complaint by a social services authority and the Commission for Social Care Inspection (acting in its review capacity) to refer it to both the Local Government Ombudsman and the Parliamentary Ombudsman.  The LGO can look at the local authority’s actions and decisions and the Parliamentary Ombudsman at CSCI’s conduct of its functions.  Under the ‘old regime’ the whole of a complainant’s concerns could be looked at by the LGO. 

It gets worse where the complaint concerns both health and social care providers – not exactly an uncommon occurrence. Where a complaint spans both sectors, it is possible for CSCI, the Healthcare Commission, the LGO, PCA and HSC all to be involved.  We’re all keen to try and make some sense of this in the best interests of the complainants.  But we shouldn’t be here in the first place.

From the perspective of the individual citizen, the multiplication of decision making bodies and the frequent reorganisation of their responsibilities are likely to be confusing and bewildering.

What’s important – and what we therefore have a common interest in - is a system of public accountability that forms a virtuous circle.

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How can better scrutiny improve the quality and credibility of public services?

It seems to me that now is a particularly good time to look at how we can secure more effective independent scrutiny.

Devolution has brought about new systems of Ombudsmen – and others - for Scotland and Wales and has highlighted the need for us to look afresh about how we work with these new bodies and how we organise our own scrutiny network.

High profile cases, such as Shipman, have also raised questions about the effectiveness of public scrutiny. And, in addition many government departments are being asked to slim down, become more joined-up and customer-focused – placing new pressures on them and us to make sure we have the right checks and balances in place.

So what’s the answer – how we can secure more effective independent scrutiny – the type of scrutiny that can help improve the quality and credibility of public services?  Let’s remind ourselves of the Good Scrutiny model we looked at earlier.

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I suspect that the rapid and constant change is an enemy of good scrutiny - so one thing I won’t be calling for is a complete review of the entire independent scrutiny network.

From the cases that come into my Office, it’s clear to me that major policy changes are often not well considered or implemented. A frequent feature of Ombudsman cases is the impact on individuals of constant legislative change, which has been inadequately thought through – or introduced before the systems or the people were in place to implement it properly.

So, my first suggestion for using scrutiny to improve public services would be to ask that new legislation receive more detailed and effective scrutiny.  That means at all stages, from drafting onwards. The process may take a little longer at the beginning, but the benefit will be a smoother passage through Parliament and better quality legislation. This change in the pace of the legislative process will require policy makers to be more disciplined and to focus more on the needs of the public and less on departmental agendas.  

I would argue that as Bills pass through their successive stages their sponsors need to keep asking themselves what will this mean in practice for the customer? Keeping the customer as the reference point should ensure legislation is critically examined, or scrutinised, against appropriate criteria.

Ombudsmen, the NAO and other independent scrutineers have a good overview of the scrutiny network and can advise government departments on how to build in effective accountability and scrutiny in advance of legislation. Whilst ownership of Bills by individual government departments will no doubt continue to be an issue we can provide independent advice to ensure: clear lines of responsibility at every level: mutual accountability of all partners; and transparency of accountability mechanisms to all partners and stakeholders.

Moving on, I’d argue that a Departmental focus on getting legislation through Parliament often leads to a ‘front-end driven’ approach. What I’d like to see is more attention to making legislation work effectively in practice after Bills have been passed. Government departments and scrutineers need to work together to make sure this happens in a timely and managed way.

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I also believe there’s still a great deal that Ombudsmen and other independent scrutineers can do to work together effectively. We need to avoid working in silos, to become more aware of each other, to co-ordinate our activities, communicate more effectively and to develop agreements about our roles and remits. Rather than a review of the entire scrutiny network, we can identify and implement effective changes now if we make the customer our reference point – and commit to working together in their interest.

As government gets more joined up, so must Ombudsmen and other scrutineers. As recommended in the Collcutt review, the Office of the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman is working more closely with the Local Government Ombudsmen and we recently launched two joint investigations in recognition of the need to join up the National Health Service with locally funded and delivered social services.

We also work closely with colleagues in other health bodies – such as the GMC, the Healthcare Commission, the NPSA, and NCAA to understand our respective roles and to work together to provide a more transparent and user-friendly service for customers.

So, to conclude.  I’m not a great one for calling people to action, demanding urgent reviews – that’s what gets us into the sort of trouble I’ve been talking about.  I’m more interested in organic change, thinking things through, working through the implications.  I’m more likely to call for a halt – and for dialogue - than for a hurricane of activity – with all the damage that ensues.  I think it highly likely that the words on my gravestone – if I have one – will be ‘Can we just hang on a minute…’  

But I have to make some recommendations – because Ombudsmen always end with recommendations.  So let me offer you these as a summary of what I have been saying this evening.

So it only remains to me to thank the Centre for Public Scrutiny for inviting me to come and talk to you – and I look forward to hearing the views of all the other executive and non executive scrutineers in the audience this evening.

Ann Abraham
Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman
January 2005

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Last updated: 4 April 2005