Former councillors receive apology and £1,000 payout

AFORMER leader and deputy leader of Powys County Council have received an apology and £1,000 after the Public Services Ombudsman for Wales upheld a complaint they made against the authority.

Both former councillors Bryn Thomas, and Graham Brown, had stood down at the council elections in May 2017.

But a few months later, in the wake of the critical inspection report into children’s services, they were criticised at a full council meeting on October 18, 2017, by former PCC chief executive Jeremy Patterson.

A few days later, Mr Patterson went off sick and left PCC in September 2018.

A first complaint made by the pair about Mr Patterson’s comments was upheld by the ombudsman in December 2018.

Their second complaint centres on the way the investigation was handled, taking more than two years to resolve.

The report by ombudsman Nick Bennett was completed in March, but due to the coronavirus pandemic has only just been published and made available to the public.

Both councillors are known in the report as Mr X and Mr Y.

Mr Bennett said: “They complained about the delay in having their concerns investigated.”

Mr X and Mr Y received a response after a “significant delay” on February 28, 2019.

“It showed their concerns had not been investigated properly or professionally, and that the officer who had conducted it, a solicitor at the council, had a close working relationship with the former chief executive.

“Therefore, they said he could not have undertaken it objectively.”

He found that Mr X and Mr Y’s concerns had been considered in a “muddled way”, having initially not been dealt with under the corporate complaints policy.

This led to the significant delay in completing the investigation.

Mr Bennett continued: “Furthermore, the solicitor charged with undertaking it was an inappropriate choice given he had been highlighted in the original complaint as potentially being a witness to relevant events, and so there was a potential conflict of interest.”

The policy allowed for “serious” matters (not defined) to be investigated by someone outside the council.

Mr Bennett felt that a complaint against the council’s most senior officer was “serious”.

Mr Bennett found that no contemporaneous record of the meeting between the solicitor and Mr Patterson as part of the complaint investigation had been made.

Mr Bennett found this to be poor practice in complaint handling and to be “maladministration” and so upheld the complaint.

PCC has accepted the ombudsman’s recommendations to “apologise to Mr X and Mr Y and to offer both £1,000 in recognition of the distress caused by the serious failings in complaint handling”.

They have also agreed to review its policy giving particular consideration as to when an independent investigator should be appointed.

A spokesman for Powys County Council said: “I can confirm the council has sent a letter of apology and paid what the ombudsman recommended.”