Complaints made by children in care (FOI)

Request

Could you give me the details of complaints made by children / young people in care about the care system in Jersey in the past three years.

Could these figures be broken in down into the nature of the complaint and how they were dealt with.

Response

Formal complaints received by Children’s Residential and Secure Services from children and young people in care:

• 1 October 2016 to 31 September 2017:  6

• 1 October 2015 to 31 September 2016: 12

• 1 October 2014 to 31 September 2015:  2

The primary subject of the complaints were as follows:

• staff behaviour: 11

• other resident’s behaviour: 4

• care provision: 2

• premises / facilities: 3

Since January 2016 all feedback for Community and Social Services has been managed centrally. Complaints are dealt with under the Health and Social Services Complaints Policy whereby an appropriate service manager is assigned to investigate the complaint and respond to the child or young person. If the complainant is not satisfied they can request a review by a Service Director and subsequently an independent review by a complaints panel.

Prior to 2016 complaints were usually managed locally within individual homes by team managers and / or heads of service. Therefore the 2014 / 2015 data only includes complaints escalated to the Quality Assurance Manager and Service Director. It is not possible to collate further complaints data for this period within the time limit allowed under the Freedom of Information (Jersey) Law 2011.

Exemption Applied

Article 16 - A scheduled public authority may refuse to supply information if cost excessive

(1) A scheduled public authority that has been requested to supply information may refuse to supply the information if it estimates that the cost of doing so would exceed an amount determined in the manner prescribed by Regulations.

Regulation 2 (1) of the Freedom of Information (Costs) (Jersey) Regulations 2014 allows an authority to refuse a request for information where the estimated cost of dealing with the request would exceed the specified amount of the cost limit of £500. This is the estimated cost of one person spending 12.5 working hours in determining whether the department holds the information, locating, retrieving and extracting the information.