The Ombudsman's final decision
Summary: We will not investigate this complaint that the complainant has been stopped from voicing his concerns about a motion passed to make the Council more inclusive of transgender and non-binary people. This is because there is insufficient evidence of fault causing the complainant a significant personal injustice.
The complaint
The complainant, who I will call Mr X complains about the Council’s decision to pass a motion to be more inclusive of transgender and non-binary people. Mr X strongly disagrees with the policy and complains that he has been stopped from voicing his concerns about its implementation and that he was subsequently warned about the content of correspondence he sent to the Council about the matter.
The Ombudsman’s role and powers
The Ombudsman investigates complaints about ‘maladministration’ and ‘service failure’, which we call ‘fault’. We must also consider whether any fault has had an adverse impact on the person making the complaint, which we call ‘injustice’. We provide a free service, but must use public money carefully. We do not start or may decide not to continue with an investigation if we decide: there is not enough evidence of fault to justify investigating, or any fault has not caused injustice to the person who complained, or any injustice is not significant enough to justify our involvement.
(Local Government Act 1974, section 24A(6))
How I considered this complaint
I considered information provided by the complainant and the Council.
I considered the Ombudsman’s Assessment Code.
My assessment
I will not investigate Mr X’s complaint that the Council failed to properly publicise the motion, which meant that people were prevented from speaking against it meaning only those in support of the motion spoke at the meeting. This is because there is no evidence of fault by the Council. The motion was included on the meeting agenda which was published on the Council’s website.
I will not investigate Mr X’s complaint that he was stopped from voicing his concerns about the motion in a subsequent meeting. This is because there is no evidence of fault in how the Council dealt with the matter. Whilst the Council did ask Mr X to make some changes to his address, it did so in accordance with its constitution which places some restrictions on what can be said in public meetings. Mr X agreed to the changes and spoke for 5 minutes on the subject, so I also do not consider that Mr X suffered any injustice After he addressed the meeting Mr X wrote to the Chief Executive of the Council and several councillors. The Council’s Monitoring Officer reviewed the correspondence and considered it to be offensive and threatening and warned Mr X if further similar correspondence were to be received it may take legal action or contact the police. The subsequent investigation into Mr X’s complaint agreed that the contents of Mr X’s correspondence were offensive and contained false claims, but it did not consider the contents were threatening.
I will not investigate this final element of Mr X’s complaint. The Council is entitled to reach the view that the contents of the correspondence was offensive and therefore I do not consider its decision to warn Mr X about his future contact was affected by fault. I do not consider that the Council’s warning that it may take legal action or contact the police alone caused Mr X a significant enough injustice to warrant our further investigation. Furthermore, it has not acted on these warnings.
Final decision
We will not investigate Mr X’s complaint because there is insufficient evidence of fault which has caused him a significant injustice.
Investigator's decision on behalf of the Ombudsman