I've been having a miserable time with a government service recently. There is a complaint under way, so I won't name the organisation or get into the merits of the case here. I'd rather write about the part that has got under my skin: how clear a public body can be about what it expects from you, and how hard it can be to find out what happens when you tell it something may be wrong.
At one point I received a reply that acknowledged my email, confirmed that the action against me would remain in place and directed me to the complaints process. The reply didn't tell me what, if anything, my email had changed. There may be perfectly sound reasons for that answer. I don't have the full picture yet. From my end, though, the complaint and the action seemed able to carry on separately, with no explanation of how one might affect the other.
The language I'd been dealing with already felt unnecessarily aggressive. It is hard to separate that tone from the way the service works. If an organisation is confident and specific when it tells you what will happen if you don't act, you start to notice when it is much less specific about what it will do after you challenge something. A link to a complaints procedure tells you where to go next. It doesn't tell you whether anybody can actually change what is happening now.
There's also a more personal reason this has bothered me. I try to be a good, law-abiding, tax-paying citizen. That doesn't make me right about every dispute, but when the tone feels aggressive and the action carries on while I am trying to challenge it, the feeling is one of injustice. This isn't the first time in my life I've been on the receiving end of treatment like this from a public service. It leaves a bad taste, and knowing there is a complaints procedure doesn't take that away.
I work in public service, so my first instinct is to picture how this might be divided up internally. Perhaps one team handles correspondence, another enforcement and another complaints. I don't know whether that is true here, or what anyone has done behind the scenes with my email. But from this side the joins show up in the uncertainty: I still cannot tell whether raising a problem with one part can make any difference to another.
At work I spend a lot of time thinking about joining up systems and making processes quicker. Being on the receiving end has made me ask a more basic question. When a person says there may be a mistake, can anyone see the whole case and change course? And will someone tell them what is happening while they wait? Speeding up correspondence wouldn't answer that.
I don't expect an enforcement process to stop automatically because someone disputes it. I do think a public body should be able to explain what happens to that process while a challenge is considered. It has powers the person receiving the correspondence doesn't have, and that ought to come with a serious obligation to check its own work.
My complaint is still open. The action is still in place. I don't yet know whether anyone dealing with one can affect the other.