Ombudsman Services:Property - The Ombudsmans61percent Campaign. (554)

To the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Secretary:
For Clarity - Attempt 554.

554: The Ombudsman's Investigations Need Investigating.

Dear Mr Clark,

All too often, what passes for the, "investigation" of a consumer's complaint by ombudsmen often only succeeds in making a mockery of the British judicial system - we're kangaroos being lined up to go to their court. It's time we took back control.

Naomi Creutzfeldt and Chris Gill tells us that,
"Generally, some participants felt the confidentiality of ombudsman schemes' processes was used as a smokescreen. It was harder for people to understand and access the fairness of ombudsman processes compared with those which are more visible, such as courts. This was exacerbated by the fact that ombudsman schemes were seen to operate in a grey area without clear and fixed criteria. There was no definition of an investigation nor did the term 'maladministration' and 'fair and reasonable' provide any clear criteria or standards against which actions could be judged."
(www.ox.law.ac.uk/sites/files/ oxlaw/critics-of-the-ombudsman-system-understanding-and-engaging-online-citizen-activists.)

In other words ombudsmen make it up as they go along.

At Ombudsman Services:Property there are two categories of evidence; Members' evidence, which is accepted unquestioningly by their ombudsman and complainants' evidence which is subjected to bizarre and bewildering distortions before being binned. It seems that the ombudsman will go to any length to discredit what complainants say.

In our case we sent in photographic evidence (as had our surveyor) only to be told that the ombudsman, "had not sought them - the photographs - out."

Mr Clark, wouldn't you agree with us that it's hard to conduct a serious investigation when you don't look at the evidence.

In light of this failure to seek out the evidence we asked the ombudsman for an independent resurvey only to be told that had she considered this necessary she would have asked for one at the time.

Perhaps the ombudsman's reasoning behind her decision was that to have done so - ie ordered a resurvey - could have resulted in an independent confirmation of what we had been saying all along and thus have forced her to find against her fee-paying Member.
The RICS would not have seen this as, "an effective resolution of a dispute" and so she didn't.

Q. Mr Clark, how can this be either, "fair" or "reasonable?"

Q. Mr Clark why doesn't this organisation publish data on the number of requests made by complainants for independent resurveys and the number of requests which are subsequently granted by the ombudsman?

Q. Mr Clark, when are you going to step up and challenge the vested interests of the RICS and its appointed company, Ombudsman Services:Property and right the wrong of it ombudsman's illogical Final Decisions and its executives' maladministration?

Yours sincerely,
Steve Gilbert - The Ombudsmans61percent Campaign.