Mr. Peter Tyndall:

Yes we can and yes we do. We could use it more. Ombudsman offices have all gone online and into social media to a much greater extent in recent years, as I have said. We try to encourage people to use the web form as the principal means of submitting complaints. We always need to be aware there are plenty of people out there who prefer to write or speak on the phone, so these processes cannot be used instead of the old methods. We are working on our web form currently to make it more accessible and to give more interaction with people complaining. For example, if they are trying to complain about a particular local authority service, it would bring up information about what we can and cannot do with claims about the service or it would signpost people elsewhere. As I have said, Twitter has been a good platform for us and many people have reached us on that.

Interestingly, in developing countries and certainly in Africa, the ombudsman community relies very heavily on mobile phones because it is one of the few means of communication that is pretty universal. They use those processes a lot in some countries, and sometimes in a more sophisticated way than we do. We have been slow and there are challenges in giving people information about the status of a complaint via the website. We do that via email but it can be helpful for people to be able to log on without needing interaction with us. It is an area we can certainly improve. It is very clear the digital native generation we have now will not thank us for sending them forms and asking them to fill them in with pen and paper. For many of them, the last time they used pen and paper was when they did their leaving certificate. People expect to be able to interact with us in different ways.

One of the strange outcomes of Covid-19 is that we always thought going paper free would be a great challenge. We are used to dealing with large paper files, both those generated ourselves and those sent to us by public bodies. Suddenly nearly everything is online and the challenge turned out to be entirely overcome because of the circumstances. We see more developments in that direction as we go along.