Investigating complaints in lockdown

We are now well into the third month of lockdown and we know how challenging it has been for everyone who lives, or works, in prison. With regimes restricted and most outside agencies unable to work within the walls, independent scrutiny of our prisons has never been so important.

In March, along with other scrutiny bodies, we had to suspend our visits and, at the same time, couldn’t access our post to read letters of complaint or to receive documents to inform our investigations. And so, necessity became the mother of innovation; we had to find new ways of working and we had to find them quickly. In normal times, changing things in an organisation like ours takes time, people get comfortable with the way things have always been done and are nervous about breaking new ground. But these aren’t normal times and that gave us the permission, and the appetite to get on and find solutions. That’s what we have done, and these are some of those solutions. They will, we think, allow us to investigate eligible complaints just as effectively, they might even bring us, with baby steps, into the 21st century.

The letters sent to us from prisons are now directed to an organisation that can scan them securely and email them to a PPO mailbox. From there, complaints can be triaged, assessed and allocated to an investigator in the same way as before, just without the pieces of paper.

We are trying out the ‘email a prisoner’ service to acknowledge a complaint and, for some cases, to send the outcome of the complaint to the complainant. Of course, we know the emails are not protected in the way that Rule 39 letters are. So, we are carefully considering where it’s appropriate to use the service and, for some sensitive complaints, we will still send letters. How we do that is yet to be finalised; like everyone else, we have been told to work from home so we need to find a way to print letters, put them into our PPO envelopes and frank the letters for posting. That can’t be done from home so we are working on a safe way to do it and we will let people know when that can happen.

For our investigations, prisons have scanned documents and sent them to us digitally, rather than the photocopies we would have expected in the past. That is quicker, greener and we should be asking ourselves why we didn’t do that years ago. We are still able to carry out interviews with staff, we have always done most of those by phone or video call and that hasn’t changed.

So, this use of technology to support our processes is certainly overdue and we will keep these new ways of working under review and make changes where we need to. We’d welcome feedback from the people who complain to us and we will be looking to do even more to make sure that our scrutiny of prisons is as good as it can be until we can get back into prisons safely.

Complainants can write to us at the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman, 3rd Floor, 10 South Colonnade, London E14 4PU or call us on 0845 010 7938.

[This article first appeared in the July issue of Inside Time]