What I want the Government to do

Establish an independent cross-agency investigation mechanism for serious complaints spanning multiple public bodies, with particular safeguards for disabled, neurodivergent and cognitively impaired people.

The mechanism should have powers to obtain relevant records and audit trails, preserve evidence, establish the origin and sharing of inaccurate information, and examine decisions and actions arising from that information.

 

Why I want the Government to do it

People can become trapped between separate complaints procedures when serious concerns involve multiple public bodies, including NHS services, local authorities, education, safeguarding and social care.

This can be particularly harmful for disabled, neurodivergent and cognitively impaired people who may rely heavily upon clear instructions from professionals and public authorities.

A person should not be penalised for acting in good faith upon an instruction, direction or advice given by the very organisation responsible for their case. Where one department instructs a person to take a particular action, another department should not subsequently penalise them for complying with that instruction without first establishing the complete circumstances.

This is particularly important where disability affects memory, concentration, processing, executive functioning or the person's ability to repeatedly explain a complicated history to different departments. Reasonable adjustments should prevent those difficulties from becoming a procedural disadvantage.

Where contradictory instructions or decisions occur across different departments or organisations, responsibility for resolving those contradictions should not continually be placed upon the disabled person affected.

This is also particularly serious where documentary evidence establishes that inaccurate information concerning a person's physical or mental health has been entered into records, repeated between organisations, or relied upon in decisions affecting that person or their children, including cases where inaccuracies have subsequently been acknowledged and apologised for.

An apology or later correction does not necessarily establish how inaccurate information originated, why it was recorded, who accessed or received it, why it continued to be repeated, what decisions were influenced by it, or why existing safeguards failed to prevent this from happening.

There should therefore be an independent mechanism capable of reconstructing the complete chronology from primary evidence. This should include original and amended records, audit and access logs, referrals, safeguarding information, internal communications, information-sharing records, complaint records, instructions given to the individual and the evidence relied upon when decisions were made.

There should also be an effective escalation route where a person holds contemporaneous documentary, electronic, photographic, recorded or audit evidence of serious incidents occurring across multiple services or aspects of everyday life, but no existing body has responsibility for examining that evidence collectively.

Serious concerns can extend across healthcare, education, safeguarding, social care, housing and other essential aspects of everyday life. Separate organisations may investigate individual complaints while nobody examines the complete chronology, the movement of information between organisations, contradictory instructions, or whether apparently separate events are connected.

Disabled people should not be placed at a disadvantage because they followed official instructions, required reasonable adjustments, struggled to navigate multiple complaint systems, or were unable to repeatedly challenge inaccurate information being passed between organisations.

The existence of documented individual incidents should not require the person affected to prove the wider explanation before an independent investigation can take place. Establishing whether events are connected, whether information was improperly recorded or shared, whether actions were retaliatory or otherwise improper, and whether appropriate safeguards and reasonable adjustments were followed should be the purpose of the investigation itself.

The Government should establish a clear independent route with powers to obtain relevant records and audit trails, require preservation of evidence, examine cross-agency information sharing, establish the provenance and subsequent use of inaccurate information, examine contradictory instructions and subsequent penalties, set clear investigation timescales, and ensure inaccurate information is corrected where the evidence establishes that correction is required.