Can anyone please advise? Local authority Children's Services Complaints Manager has just closed our complaint. We saw an independent person in February and we've been working on building up the very flimsy summary of that meeting since then. This is a very, very difficult case which involves inappropriate conduct by a social worker; a complete disregard for timescales and procedures by him and his manager and a seriously ill DC of ours. This has taken its toll and we have been unsupported by the complaints team - totally. Just left to get on with it having been told that progress to stage 2 from a stage 1 complaint was in their gift. It clearly is not.
Anyway, we are now in a position to submit our complaint and sign it off as agreed, ready for investigation. However the complaints manager is implacable and today on the phone I asked her if her decision had any basis in legislation or statutory guidance. No, she said, but the "unreasonable" delay was her "concept" so she was making that decision - with the agreement of her manager in the complaints dept. I rang a number of other complaints teams in other areas as well as the local government ombudsman service - all said that this is a flexible area, that the manager should be sympathetic and supportive. Timescales apply to other areas of the procedure but not to this bit - where the complainant/s respond to the independent person's summary which might be excellent or, in our case, very shallow and in much need of addition.
What can we do? We want to see this woman's manager but fear a brick wall. LA recently got a "poor" Ofsted for its children's services and the social services complaints procedures were found wanting.
Our complaint is very serious - we don't want any other family to go through what we did. To curtail it now seems so arbitrary. Can they do that?
Thanks -