LATEST ISSUES 28th March, 2026

I received the following document by email last Thursday.

I have yet to decide how I respond to the apology from PHSO Operations Manager, Ian Higgins.

'26 March 2026

Dear Mr Stock

Your complaint about our service

Thank you for raising your concerns about the service we have provided. I am sincerely sorry to read of the impact this has had on you.

The Ombudsman’s Assurance Team are looking into your Review request and Mr Hall will be in touch in due course. For clarity, my investigation and this letter relate solely to the delays in our service that you have raised.

As requested, I have also sent a copy of this letter to Luke Murphy MP. I have reviewed all communication you have had with PHSO; read through the work we have carried out so far; and I have also spoken with Mr Body (the Senior Caseworker who made a decision on your case) and Mr Roper (the Operations Manager who oversaw the work we carried out in our Early Consideration Team (ECT) between October 2022 and August 2024). Having done so I can see that aspects of our service fell below the high standards we set ourselves. Please can I take this opportunity to apologise to you and acknowledge the delays you have faced. I have taken steps to ensure this does not happen again and I will explain this in more detail later in this letter, but I recognise that our actions will have undoubtedly caused you additional frustration and stress.

Service Review

As you set out in your ‘Open Letters’, your complaint has been with us since 2022. Your case was allocated to Mr Peirce in our Early Consideration Team in October 2022 and he closed your complaint in October 2023, as you had an ‘Alternative Legal Remedy’ open to you (as you know from Mr Peirce’s communication, the law says we are unable to look into complaints where this is the case).

I have spoken with Mr Roper (the Early Consideration Team’s Operations Manager and Mr Peirce’s line manager) and he told me that the service standard within the ECT is to provide 95% of decisions within 13 weeks of allocation. This means this decision should have been made by February 2023 rather than October 2023, a delay of around eight months.

I understand that Mr Peirce apologised to you at the time but Mr Roper has asked me to offer his apologies too. He has told me that he discussed this case with Mr Peirce at the time to stress the importance of timely decision making and they both accepted that the additional eight month delay you faced was not acceptable. Mr Roper has confirmed that Mr Peirce has learned from this.

I have seen that you then returned to us in 2024 when legal action was no longer an option and we reopened your complaint in August 2024. It was passed to a Mr Jagiello-Brown (Caseworker) and then onto Ms Fitzsimons (Senior Caseworker) when it was determined that the complexity of your complaint required more senior input. I am content that both handled your complaint in a timely manner.

Given the delays you had experienced earlier in the process, I can imagine that when your complaint was reallocated to Mr Body in January 2025, this must have caused additional frustration. Unfortunately Ms Fitzsimons discovered she had a conflict of interest and so this was the only option open to us.

Mr Body then worked on your complaint in a timely manner and I can see that he was in regular communication with you between January 2025 and him issuing our decision in April 2025.

As I mentioned at the outset, I have only looked at the delays in our service here so I am unable to comment on the decision itself, but it was clear at this stage that you were unhappy with our decision. Mr Body correctly tried to respond to your initial discontent, but when we received the letter from Luke Murphy MP on 20 May which contained your feedback, we should have taken additional steps in line with our internal policy.

Instead, Mr Body telephoned your MP’s office and spoke with somebody there to explain our decision. He thought that this had resolved things, but in line with our Review and Feedback Policy he should have either provided a full response setting out why the feedback does not change our decision or referred it to the Ombudsman’s Assurance Team. I recall him raising your dissatisfaction with me at the time but I did not explore this in sufficient detail with him so there is learning for me here too.

In August 2025, Luke Murphy MP wrote to us again to chase a response. Again, this was a missed opportunity to formally respond or to refer the feedback to the Ombudsman’s Assurance Team.

It was only when you contacted us again in February 2026 that this omission was identified and your feedback was passed to the Ombudsman’s Assurance Team. Mr Hall and I agreed to prioritise our consideration and respond within four weeks, which I am now doing on the service issues.

I am sincerely sorry for the delay in responding to your feedback that was shared with us on 20 May 2025, and again on 7 August 2025. Mr Body and I have reflected on this and we have both reviewed our Review and Feedback Policy to ensure this does not happen again. He was acting in good faith when he called your MP to discuss the feedback but he accepts that he did not follow our policy and failed to act on the follow-up contact in August 2025.

Conclusion

I recognise how strongly you feel about your complaint and can see the effort you’ve gone to at each stage to provide your views.

Please accept my sincere apology for the delays outlined above and please be assured that those involved have been spoken with and understand the impact that their decisions have had on you. Mr Body has reviewed our policies to ensure that if he receives challenges to his decisions in the future (or receives correspondence from an MP), he follows the correct process. As I mentioned above, his actions were taken with good intentions but the delays you have faced as a result are unacceptable. You can expect to hear from the Ombudsman’s Assurance Team about your substantive complaint in the next couple of weeks. Please be assured that your daughter’s complaint (who you are representing) is progressing and remains unaffected by this service review or the outcome of the Ombudsman’s Assurance Team’s review into your concerns.

Thank you for raising your concerns about our service with me and I hope you are assured that it has been taken seriously, and we have learnt from it.

Please accept my best wishes for the future.

Yours sincerely

Ian Higgins Operations Manager'