The new House of Commons Modernisation Committee has made a call for submissions to reform House of Commons procedures, standards and working practices.

We’re going to make a submission to the Committee, focused around a set of practical fixes. But there are also bigger issues that will take longer to work through. Over the next few weeks, we’re going to publish blog posts on long running issues where deeper changes would improve how Parliament works.

Previously we’ve written about how it should be easier for MPs to vote, how giving MPs more power over the timetable helps them keep promises to voters, stand-in (or locum) MPs, and using citizens assemblies’ to set standards.

This week our pitch is that Parliament should make all the casework passing through MPs offices more efficient by completing previously abandoned reform of the Ombudsman system.

Systems for dealing with things that don’t work

Part of an efficient layered democracy is helping people who feel let down by public services to raise their issues in the right place. Currently in the UK, too many complaints go through MPs to be referred back to local councillors, and the network of different complaints processes and ombudsmans* is confusing and difficult to access.

An Ombudsman is an independent official who investigates and resolves complaints from the public. Another term for ombudsman is ‘public advocate’ and in the UK system, hundreds of MPs and thousands of staff are engaged in helping constituents resolve problems dealing with government departments or agencies (and post-privatisation, the same services being delivered by private organisations). The intervention of an MP can lead to extra external and internal scrutiny and changed outcomes for the people who raised a complaint.

There are different schools of thought about how to improve this situation. Some see this as a core part of the post-war MP’s job, with an MP as a vital bridge between citizens and the technocratic state, which should be better supported with more resources. Others see this kind of advocacy as being a distraction from the national legislating duties of an MP, and believe that more of this should fall to local councillors (or more fundamentally, that things should just work without intervention).

Both these perspectives could find common ground in the idea that better systems can both ease the workload and increase the systematic effectiveness of complaints made.

Fix the ombudsman

Following years of reports recommending a change, in 2016 there was significant progress made on proposals to merge several ombudsmen together to create the Public Services Ombudsman – with the goal of reducing complexity to the citizen, and modernising the structure.

Functionally, this meant removing the “MP filter” from complaints made to the Parliamentary and Health Services Ombudsman. Currently PHSO has to turn away complainants who have not gone through their MP for non-health complaints, but can just accept health-related complaints (no one thinks this makes sense). The proposed reform also gave it a new role in improving complaint handling and promoting good practice through issuing recommendations.

Despite getting as far as a draft bill, this process has now stalled, and the PAC Committee in 2023 said that “it is disappointing that the Government has again failed to recognise the importance and urgency of sector-wide ombudsman reform. The current arrangements are outdated and needlessly complex and prevent the public from effective access to justice in cases of wrongdoing.” The PHSO continues to call for itself to be replaced, and points out the efficiency savings of replacing it. This is an area where the basic problem is agreed and the details hammered out: what is missing is Parliamentary time. But a little investment now can lead to both improved outcomes and lower costs.

A more efficient ombudsman would become a vital complement to MPs’ current work. The existing public service ombudsmans for Wales and Scotland both process comparatively few pieces of casework compared to MPs, and the mailbag volume isn’t diminishing any time soon. But the goal of the ombudsman isn’t to fix 1,000 problems individually – instead we want it to make one recommendation that fixes 10,000 problems that haven’t happened yet. Completing this oven-ready reform is vital to lighten MPs’ workload and improve public services (and people’s lives) by turning complaints into long-term solutions.

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*Because I’ve had such fun writing this footnote before: there’s no settled gender neutral pluralisation of Ombudsman. The original Swedish term (ombudsmän) is gender-neutral, and it’s fine to apply English rules and assumptions once something has become an English word (ombudsmen, or ombudspersons). Alternative approaches include shorting to ‘Ombuds’. The International Ombudsman Institute sidesteps the problem by referring to multiple ‘ombudsman institutions’, which also reflects that the idea is often localised using a term that is more descriptive in the local language (public advocate, etc). It’s not the main reason, but if we keep merging ombudsmans, it does help avoid this problem.

Image: Sear Greyson on Unsplash.