Source · SPSO (Scottish Public Services Ombudsman)

Scottish Children's Reporter Administration

SPSO (Scottish Public Services Ombudsman) Partly Upheld Reference 201600789 Sector Scottish Government and Devolved Administration Category communication staff attitude and confidentiality Decided 01 January 2017

Full decision

Summary

Mr C complained about the handling by the Scottish Children's Reporter Administration (SCRA) of his correspondence and complaint.

We found that SCRA did not fail to answer Mr C's questions, and they did not misrepresent his concerns. We did find that SCRA failed to respond to Mr C's initial correspondence and SCRA acknowledged and apologised for this. We also found that SCRA's response to Mr C's complaint did appear to end email correspondence with him unreasonably. We upheld these aspects of Mr C's complaint.

In addition, we found that SCRA's final letter to Mr C did not comply with the SPSO Act 2002 in terms of information about the right to complain to us, so we made a recommendation to address this point.

Recommendations

We recommended that SCRA: reflect on the messages given to Mr C in their final communications, to ensure that such confusion does not arise in future; and ensure that final responses to complaints comply with section 22 of the SPSO Act 2002.

Related reading

View Decision Report 201600789 as a PDF (12.43 KB) Updated: March 13, 2018

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