Creation of a National Trust ombudsman
An independent office of ombudsman should be created to ensure that the National Trust is accountable to its stakeholders and is able to resolve complaints effectively.
As one of the country’s largest charities and landowners, entrusted with the important task of being the guardian of much of the nation’s heritage for posterity, the National Trust should maintain the highest standards of governance and accountability, and should uphold at all times its statutory charitable objects and founding ethos.
It is vital that the National Trust should be seen to be accountable to its members, volunteers, tenants, covenantors and other stakeholders and that complaints are given due attention and are seen to be resolved fairly. The existence of an independent ombudsman would ensure that complaints are given proper consideration and would provide a formal avenue for their investigation and redress.
The NHS, Parliament, local authorities, universities and many other important public organisations have ombudsmen, yet the National Trust – in spite of the fact that it is one of the largest membership organisations in the world – does not benefit from one. It should not be exempt from the high standards to which other UK institutions of national importance are held.
While the Charity Commission regulates charities, including the National Trust, it does not and cannot investigate individual problems in the way that an ombudsman could.
The existence of an independent ombudsman encourages organisations to establish procedures to deal effectively and transparently with complaints at an early stage, so that the intervention of an external ombudsman is rarely needed, and then only for the most difficult cases. The ombudsman can also perform a valuable function in helping organisations to develop robust and transparent complaints procedures and in monitoring their effectiveness. At present the National Trust’s complaints procedure is not as robust as it could be. For example, while the final stage of four in the National Trust’s complaints procedure states that ‘Your complaint will be independently reviewed by the Chair’, this is not possible since the office of Chair is not independent of the Trust, and a ‘forceful advocate for the charity’ cannot also be an impartial reviewer.
In short, there is a pressing need for an independent, free and impartial ombudsman to ensure that the National Trust is accountable to those who support it.
The National Trust is rightly held to the same high standards as other institutions of national importance. High standards of governance and accountability are integral to our work, and we are subject to oversight from a large number of regulatory bodies across the different aspects of our work. We aim to provide the best possible experience and to put things right quickly when they go wrong.
However, we believe this resolution conflates several things: (i) the role of an ombudsman; (ii) accountability to our supporters; and (iii) dealing with individual complaints when we do not meet the high standards expected of us.
Ombudsman services are usually set up for specific sectors rather than individual organisations. They exist to resolve complaints from people who have received poor service in public services such as energy, telecommunications and financial services. They do not usually exist to hold individual charities to account. Charities in the UK, including the Trust, are accountable to the Charity Commission.
The Trust is also subject to oversight by external agencies across a range of our activities, including the Information Commissioner’s Office, Fundraising Regulator, Environment Agency, Food Standards Agency, Planning Inspectorate, Advertising Standards Authority, and Trading Standards. We have robust governance in place to ensure our day-to-day procedures work well, including our complaints procedures.
It’s not clear from the proposal where funding for a new ombudsman would come from. Given the high levels of accountability to which the Trust is already subject, we do not believe a further body is either necessary or a good use of charitable or taxpayer funds.
We recommend members vote against the resolution.
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Aside from the Trust’s accountability to the Charity Commission and a range of other sector bodies, our Trustees are also held to account for the Trust’s strategic direction by a Council, members of which are either directly or indirectly elected by our members.
Our complaints process has several stages of escalation to ensure we fully investigate and monitor complaints. When dealing with tenant complaints, our final stage also allows for the involvement of an external professional expert to ensure we are making fully informed, appropriate decisions.
Where there is already an ombudsman in place for an area of our work, we are accountable to them in that part of our operation. Government is in the process of introducing an ombudsman for all residential landlords, to which we will be accountable in our role as a landlord.
An ombudsman will only review complaints against an organisation once all stages of an organisation’s complaints process have been completed. In 2021, our Chair dealt with 214 complaints. Five tenant complaints have reached the final stage of our complaints process since 2018. These are against a membership of more than 5 million, over 20 million visitors to our properties and more than 11,000 tenancy/ licence agreements. By comparison, for the year 2020/21 the Financial Ombudsman Service received 278,033 complaints and Ofcom received 142,660 complaints.
In summary, we consider that an independent office of ombudsman solely for the National Trust is not needed and could waste significant charitable or taxpayer funds.
Voting information