Delivering for the public: The UK national Ombudsman’s experience

Rob Behrens,  Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman

I was pleased to speak at the Public Chairs’ Forum recent ‘Chaired Encounters’ discussion to share my perspective on some of the leadership challenges in delivering for the public.

I have worked in a lot of public bodies including arms-length ones and few are exactly the same. In my case, the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman is a Crown appointment and I report to Parliament, not Ministers. This is a crucial sign of essential independence.  No Minister can tell me what to do and, happily, not one has ever tried to.

The differences in accountability only emphasise the need for organisational leaders to share their experiences and ideas. Exchange with colleagues and peers is a valuable learning mode, and almost always less expensive than going to management consultants who sometimes have no experience of the organisations they advise.

The challenges of delivering for the public

In the case of the national Ombudsman delivering for the public is complicated. Not a lot of people, when asked, have heard of the Ombudsman service. Those that have heard of us are sometimes fuzzy or unclear about our role.

Select committees have written about the need for a “People’s” Ombudsman. In practice and in law, the Ombudsman is certainly a defender of rights and must be empathetic to the powerless. But the Ombudsman is not an advocate and must be strictly impartial between complainant and bodies in jurisdiction.
Even when the Ombudsman finds for individuals and groups, we have no binding or coercive powers to ensure our recommendations are implemented.  This complicates the issue of effectiveness, as we see from significant recommendations in the last two years where we have made big findings. For example, the Windrush scandal, women’s state pensions, continuing healthcare, and faulty decision making in the Department for Work and Pensions, without always (and so far) securing compliance.

Making sure the Ombudsman delivers effectively

In my view, six things are indispensable for making sure the Ombudsman delivers effectively for the public in England and the UK:

1. Clarity of purpose

Without a crystal-clear vision, values and strategy, we have no chance of persuading our colleagues in our workforce that we know where we are going. Unless they are persuaded, leaders are “generals without an army”, and our principal mechanisms of change and engagement with the public are disempowered.

2. Seeking to win public trust

All public organisations need to seek, win or regain public trust. Essential reading is Onora O’Neill’s Reith Lectures. The central ingredients are honesty, competence, the promotion of transparency, and treating service users with dignity, respect and fair dealing. We know from Windrush, HS2 and hospital cover-ups of avoidable deaths, that dignity and respectful treatment cannot always be counted on. We also know that a very small number of complainants behave in an unacceptable manner. Our duty as leaders is to make clear the consequences of unacceptable behaviour from wherever it comes and to support our staff if they are unacceptably abused or criticised.

3. Having evidence-bases that tell you what your stakeholders think of your organisation

We have a Service Charter to benchmark our practice and a stream of related data collected and published quarterly by independent social researchers. This tells us what our service users think about how we deliver our services. Last year, 73 per cent of our service users judged our service as ‘impartial’. Satisfaction with the outcome of our complaint handling is lower, particularly where the complaint is not upheld. This is a structural challenge for all Ombudsman schemes but that’s not a reason for not trying to improve the scores.

4. Using your networks to learn how to do things better (peer review)

Over the years we have learned the outstanding value of networking with and learning from sister institutions both inside the UK and internationally. We are members of both the (UK-based) Ombudsman Association and the International Ombudsman Institute (IOI) which has Ombudsman members in 140 countries. Exchange among all is prodigious. In 2018, I commissioned the Irish national Ombudsman to lead an independent peer review of PHSO. Peer reviewers examined data and papers and had free access to our offices and staff in Manchester. What transpired was a written, published report setting out in constructively critical fashion the progress made and challenges to come. This was subsequently scrutinised and endorsed by the House of Commons Select Committee on Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs (PACAC).

In similar fashion, to learn the lessons of managing in the recent and long-running pandemic, we worked jointly with the International Ombudsman Institute and the University of Glasgow from 2020 to survey national Ombudsman schemes around the world. The final report, The Art of the Ombudsman: leadership through international crisis,  includes experience from 53 schemes in 37 countries and has led to a current and vibrant IOI project to modernise Ombudsman accountability, professionalism and accessibility.

5. Being representative of the communities you serve

We know that Ombudsman offices have to perform better at reaching out and making ourselves more accessible to vulnerable and marginalised communities. But we also know that the impact of this depends upon our workforce being representative of the communities that we serve and at all levels. All Ombudsman schemes have work to do in this area,  especially in terms of ethnicity and disability. 71 per cent of Ombudsman respondents to our international survey were male, but at least PHSO has no gender pay gap.

6. Demonstrating leadership. ‘Leadership’ is one of the Seven Principles of Public Life and of all the Nolan Principles, the least clearly defined. All leaders of public services organisations have a duty to respect and abide by not only the Seven Principles of Public Life but also their own organisational values and behaviours. This is particularly in the case of national Ombudsman institutions like PHSO which rely on moral authority in the absence of coercive powers and which tend to operate with a guiding governance principle of ‘corporation sole’. This means that – in formal terms – the Ombudsman is responsible to Parliament for most aspects of decision-making.

Effective organisations have leaders at all levels, think carefully about leadership styles and monitor organisational culture. We have seen recent serious cases of bullying and discrimination, for example,  in the Metropolitan Police Service and the Healthcare Safety Investigation Branch (HSIB) of the National Health Service when this activity was neglected.

Of course, effective leadership is harder to practice than to define, but in my view it requires as a minimum:

• a competence to deliver what is promised or (at least) a plausible public account exploring why this was not possible
• an appreciation of both organisational and external worlds
• a capacity to listen and converse
• a well-consulted strategy
• colleagues who understand both the importance of collegiality and challenge.

Rob will join a panel at our upcoming event on 5 April, ‘Transforming public bodies: Public service in the context of declining trust and confidence.’ To hear him speak, PCF members can register here.