Ombudsman's Report Summary

Grants to voluntary bodies
Mr Abdullah (not his real name for legal reasons) complained on behalf of an ethnic minority organisation that the Council had failed to implement the recomendations of its own investigation report that an advice worker post previously funded by the Council should be returned to the organisation's advice centre. Mr Abdullah further complained that the original decision to withdraw the post amounted to institutional racism, and that the officer concerned had been motivated by personal racism.

A related complaint was recieved from Mr Hobson (again not his real name) on behalf of another ethnic minority organisation that his organisation's views were not taken into account when the Council adopted its advice strategy.

The Ombudsman found no evidence of personal racism in the conduct of the officer involved. The circumstances of the complaints were too limited for her to come to a view on whether the Council's approach amounted to institutional racism. She found no evidence of maladministration in the fact that the post has not yet been returned to Mr Abdullah's organisation.

However, the Ombudsman found maladministration in the failure of the Council to give a detailed explanation of its decision to withdraw funding for two advice posts. The Ombudsman also considered the poor performance of consultants hired by the Council to look at provision for advice to black ethnic minority communities to be maladministration, as was the Council's lack of sufficient effort at an earlier stage to collect reliable data on the size of minority ethnic populations in the city. She did not, however, find that this had necessarily made any difference to the outcome.

The failure of the Council to ensure that the Cabinet had before it all relevant documents when making its decision was maladministration, even though at least some Cabinet members were aware of the missing papers. Although the outcome was not affected, the Cabinet meeting was a public meeting at which justice had to be seen to be done.

The Ombudsman considered that the cumulative effect of the maladministration she identified was to lessen the confidence of minority ethnic organisations in the Council's fairness.

Finding
Maladministration causing injustice to the complainants.

Recommended remedy
The Council should proritise its work on estimates of minority populations; a senior officer should negotiate with Mr Abdullah's organisation for the return of the advice worker on mutually acceptable terms; and the Council should consider as a matter of priority the implementation of its agreed provision for advice to elderly Afro-Caribbean people.