The Commissioner’s powers of investigation will soon be changing.
At the moment, he has the power to investigate matters on behalf of groups of children and young people.
From April 2016, he’ll also be able to do this on behalf of individuals.
The Education and Culture Committee
The Scottish Parliament’s Education and Culture Committee have been responsible for closely examining the Children and Young People (Scotland) Act 2014— which extends the Commissioner’s powers.
This Committee are interested in how the Commissioner plans to use his new powers. In order to use them, he can’t duplicate the work of another body. This means that he won’t be able to investigate a complaint – about an individual or a group – where it would duplicate (copy) the work of another organisation.
As a lot of complaints bodies and regulators already exist in Scotland, the Commissioner wrote to the Committee at the end of 2014 to say he intended to carry out a mapping exercise.
A mapping exercise
The Commissioner’s mapping exercise set out to:
- look at the main bodies handling complaints in Scotland
- help the Commissioner better understand the powers of these bodies, including what they could and couldn’t investigate.
Through doing this, the exercise intended to highlight to the Commissioner the types of cases where his new powers could be most effective. The Commissioner offered to feed his findings back to the Committee.
Talking to children and young people
As well as speaking to complaints handling bodies and regulators, the Commissioner wanted to hear about the experiences children, young people and those working closely with them had of complaining. To achieve this, his office:
- commissioned Children’s Parliament to produce a report on children and young people’s views of making complaints.
- organised a roundtable event to bring together people who worked with a wide range of children and young people.
Producing reports
At the end of May 2015, the Commissioner presented three reports to the Education and Culture Committee:
The reports found that:
- children and young people currently face significant difficulties in bringing complaints
- while complaints bodies and regulators would welcome complaints from children and young people, these are rarely made in practice.
A model of operation
The Commissioner has created a model of operation that follows on from the mapping exercise, and the views of children and young people and those working alongside them. This sets out how the Commissioner sees his new powers working in practice.
The Commissioner and his team discussed this model of operation in detail when they gave evidence to the Education and Committee in June 2015. In their evidence, they were clear that the office was likely to carry out a small number of investigations each year.
However, the model of operation has been developed to take account of the stated desire of children and young people to seek local resolution where possible.
The Commissioner and his team outlined an approach where they would work with a child or young person, supporting them to access local complaints processes through:
- finding out the child or young person’s views around what they wanted to happen
- outlining the various complaints options open to the child or young person
- helping the child or young person identify and access local support that would allow them to progress their complaint.
Alongside this, the Commissioner and his team outlined plans to work closely with other complaints bodies and regulators, to make sure that complaints processes across Scotland are fully accessible to children and young people.