PRESS RELEASE : Home Office launches Independent Examiner of Complaints Service [October 2022]
The press release issued by the Home Office on 17 October 2022.
The Home Office has launched a new Independent Examiner of Complaints (IEC) service for customers of the Department’s immigration services.
In doing so, the Home Office has fulfilled another of the recommendations in Wendy Williams’ Windrush Lessons Learned Review, published in March 2020.
Introducing an IEC service brings the Department in line with several other public service delivery departments such as the Department for Work and Pensions and His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs.
If customers are not satisfied with the final response to their complaints, they will have an opportunity to have their case reviewed independently by the IEC.
Although the IEC will not have any remit over immigration decisions, which remain subject to existing appeal processes, they will apply greater scrutiny and ultimately increase public confidence in the customer services delivered by the Home Office, as well as helping to manage reputational risk.
In making her original recommendation, Wendy Williams proposed that the new service should have the ability to identify systemic issues within the immigration system. The IEC will achieve that by using the data and insight from complaints to consider why particular issues might be arising and feed them back into the department to support the continuous improvement of services.
The Home Office is pleased to announce that, following a fair and open recruitment process, Moi Ali has been appointed as the new Independent Examiner of Complaints. She will be supported by an Office for the IEC, based in Stoke-on-Trent.
Ms Ali has a background in independent complaints review. For the last 4 years she has been the Independent Assessor of Complaints for the Crown Prosecution Service and she will continue in that role on a part-time basis. She is passionate about providing a genuinely independent service, and about helping organisations to identify learning and wider lessons from complaints in order to improve their service.
Her approach is to understand the complainant journey and perspective, and to support staff to provide a complainant-centric service.
