Up to 40,000 cases from a system that logs complaints against Bristol City Council were stuck in an "unfathomable" spreadsheet, causing delays to investigations that will continue for another year or two, it has emerged.
The local government watchdog expressed concerns about the delays in an unusually critical annual review letter to the local authority.
The council claimed last week it had “solved” the “issues regarding IT systems" that lay behind the delays responding to enquiries from the Local Government & Social Care Ombudsman in 2019/20.
But the officer who manages the complaints process said this week that “that problem still exists” and will continue to affect a small but dwindling number of cases each year.
Garfield Horner told members of the audit committee on Monday (November 23) that the delays were caused when the council introduced a new complaints IT system a year ago.
Records for up to 40,000 cases from the previous five years were not migrated to the new system but were put into an “unfathomable” spreadsheet instead, he said.
That “IT decision” made it “virtually impossible” to find information for the ombudsman about cases under investigation that started life on the old system, Mr Horner said.
“That was behind the delays,” he said. “We were spending days and weeks looking for things. It was just incredibly hard.”
The meeting heard that ombudsman’s investigations often span a number of years.
Mr Horner said 80 per cent of the complaints against the council that were upheld by the ombudsman last year were in that category and so were affected by the delays.
He said he expected that proportion to fall to “around 10 per cent” next year, so “there might be the odd one or two”.
An extra staff member had been taken on to help with the extra searching required for those hard-to-track cases, he added.
The ombudsman upheld 20 complaints against the council out of a total of 130 cases in 2019/20, compared with 12 out of 124 the previous year.
Audit committee chair Mark Brain expressed sympathy for the people who made the complaints and concern at the delays to investigations highlighted by the ombudsman.
Councillor Brain, who is a member of the majority Labour group, said: “I have to say I found this report to be a little bit on the shocking side.”
“Clearly we can’t have a repetition of this.
“It’s just not fair on our citizens at all.
“It might only be 20 citizens out of however many, but that’s 20 people’s lives...so I have a lot of sympathy for people who’ve been affected in this way.”
Head of legal services Nancy Rollason assured the committee that the complaints process would steadily improve.
She said: “Now that the system is fully in place and information is being entered on that system, the information required to respond to the ombudsman will be fully available.
“The number of people dealing with complaints has now been increased.
“So the assumption is we’ll be in a lot better position to be able to act more quickly to deal with these complaints going forward.”
