§ Mr. BreedTo ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs how many complaints were registered against her Department and its predecessor Departments in(a) 1990 to 1996 and (b) 1997 to 2002; how many are current; and what proportion were (i) taken up and (ii) upheld by the Parliamentary Ombudsman in this period. [42903]
§ Mr. MorleyThe table shows up-to-date information from records in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs for the number of citizens charter complaints received since 1995.
Citizens charter complaints received by MAFF and DEFRA1 1995–962 1997–2002 Total Number of citizens charter complaints3 23 141 164 Current citizens charter complaints 0 3 3 Number of citizens charter complaints referred to PCA4 1 4 5 Number of citizens charter complaints upheld by PCA 0 0 0 1 Prior to the creation of DEFRA, the Department for the Environment, Transport and the Regions did not maintain a record of complaints that were referred to its central office for citizens charter issues. A manual count of DETR's complaints cannot be conducted without disproportionate effort. Before it became part of DEFRA, the Hunting Policy Unit of the Home Office did not receive any complaints. 2 Before the establishment of the citizens charters for Government Departments, the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food did not have a central unit for co-ordinating responses to complaints. As a result, DEFRA cannot co-ordinate statistics for complaints prior to 1995 without disproportionate effort. 3 DEFRA's central unit for citizens charter complaints deals with all complaints addressed to DEFRA's complaints adjudicator. Centralised records do not exist for complaints addressed directly to individual divisions, and so DEFRA cannot co-ordinate figures for these without disproportionate effort. 4 These figures do not include complaints made directly to the PCA. The total number of complaints that the Parliamentary Ombudsman investigated are in his annual reports.