Boost the Ombudsman

The Ombudsman is a servant of Parliament and a creation of the National Constitution. The Office addresses the woes of individuals, and in doing so, may change how public bodies operate. The Office of the Ombudsman recently presented its 28th Annual Report for 2005 to Parliament. A number of concerns were raised.

The report states that last year the Ombudsman received 1,344 complaints, of which just 184 complaints were resolved. In addition, last year a backlog of 2,600 complaints brought forward. So in 2005 the Ombudsman faced a total workload of 3,944 cases. Of these, he deemed 3,399 to be within his remit to investigate, and of these he concluded a total of 699 cases, or 21 percent of the total workload.

It seems that the Ombudsman, just like many other public watchdogs, suffers from a lack of resources, in this case a shortage of staff.

The Constitution in section 92(1) states: “The Ombudsman shall be provided with a staff adequate for the efficient discharge of his functions.”

The report suggests the office is short-staffed. The Ombudsman currently has one senior investigator and five investigators, of whom one is in Tobago.

In 2003 Cabinet agreed that the Ombudsman be given more staff in the form of a director of investigations and complaints resolution, another senior investigator, and three more investigators.

Unfortunately to date these posts have not been filled.

We ask, why not?

The Ombudsman is too important an office to be left to languish. Many people aggrieved by officialdom cannot afford the expense, delay and unpredictability of a lawsuit, and instead must seek justice from the Ombudsman.

The Ombudsman relies on the cooperation of public bodies and uses moral suasion as opposed to legal coercion to ask them to comply with his recommendations. It has been long debated in other jurisdictions whether the Ombudsman’s decision should be made enforceable by a lawcourt, or whether his true strength actually lies in his relying on voluntary compliance by public bodies. We will reserve comment.

What we will say however is that it is untenable that the work of the Ombudsman is apparently being hindered by a staff shortage.

The recent report lists a vast range of areas in which the office has intervened. These areas include the terms of people’s employment, where the Ombudsman has suggested a review of the pension laws affecting public sector employees. On the environment, he has lamented the non-implementation of the Air Pollution and Water Pollution Rules. For yet another year, he has criticised TSTT and WASA for billing customers respectively for telephone calls allegedly made during a period when the phone was not working, and for a supply of water to a property which the complainant did not own or occupy.

Under “areas of concern” the Ombudsman recalled the neglect of a group of Hansens’s Disease patients transferred from Chacachacare to the mainland whose plight he had highlighted in his 2000 report.

They had been promised land, housing, financial aid, and medical help, but the 2005 report lamented: “Seventeen years after the closure a group representing 51 surviving patients visited my office to complain that the promises made to them by the State had not been fulfilled.”

These are but a few cases that show the importance of the Ombudsman. Recently the baton has been passed on from Justice George Edoo to former solicitor general Lynette Stephenson, Senior Counsel. We trust that the good work of the Ombudsman will continue and that Parliament will fully resource this vital office.