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Complaint Handling in Kildare County Council - A Report of the Ombudsman's experience of dealing with complaints against Kildare County Council

Recommendations

This report did not set out to analyse the reasons why Kildare County Council has provided a less than adequate service to the Ombudsman, as illustrated in Appendix 1. It may be a matter of internal communications rather than any systemic inertia in dealing with the Ombudsman's correspondence. Whatever the reason, it is for the Council to address the matter and ensure its internal communication systems are such that correspondence from the Ombudsman does fall into a "black hole" and that its liaison procedures are sufficiently robust to ensue that information/reports are provided to the Ombudsman in an appropriate and timely way.

Evidence of improvement by KCC is imperative in 2007 and beyond. KCC, needs to demonstrate that it takes notification of complaints from this Office seriously, as the vast majority of local authorities do, and that it is prepared to provide the Ombudsman with the information requested in an appropriate and timely manner.

While she would be reluctant to do so, the Ombudsman may, in the absence of significant improvement, have no alternative but to make a report to the Oireachtas and, if she considers it appropriate, to the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government, on the performance of Kildare County Council in providing responses/reports on complaints from the Ombudsman.

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