Ombuds for all problems

Something to report to the Rail Ombuds?

The Economist reported a couple of weeks ago that the Housing Ombudsman established to resolve disputes between landlords and tenants was part of a government promise to ban “no fault” evictions. Thanks to this, landlords will no longer be able to evict tenants without reason and with short notice. Given the ever-deepening housing problem in the UK, I immediately thought the establishment of an ombudsman for this purpose was an ingenious idea. However, the Economist underlined that as with the enforcement of other existing housing laws, the implementation of the new regulation would also be problematic.

Unconvinced, I immediately went to the website of the Housing Ombudsman. It turned out that it was established at least four years ago, but this was the first time I heard about it. I then remembered the ‘Rail Ombudsman’ advert I spotted on the train when I first moved to the UK in 2019. Again, I’d never heard of it. This made me question what other kinds of ombuds services are available in the UK. A search by Chat GPT revealed the following Ombuds Offices:

The Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman

The Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman

The Financial Ombudsman Service

The Office of the Independent Adjudicator for Higher Education

The Pensions Ombudsman

The Legal Ombudsman

The Energy Ombudsman

The Communications Ombudsman

The Water Ombudsman

I felt perplexed as I’d never heard of any of these services other than the Financial and Legal Ombudsman (and this was only through my profession), I made the same inquiry with Google. This landed me on a “find an ombudsman” website which listed the following categories for an ombudsman: armed forces; automotive; children; communications; construction; data protection and information (only in Cayman Islands!); education; energy; estate agents; financial services; football; furniture; health and social care; home improvements; legal services; pensions; public appointments; public services; removals; standards in public life; transport and waterways. Some of these exist only in Scotland and Northern Island; some are in weird areas such as housing furniture and home improvement or football rather than really important public issues.

First of all, notice that in the UK they are all ombuds “man” rather than having a gender- neutral name. Second, the prevalence of alternative methods of dispute resolution seems to have reached a different level here. I’ve already covered in my podcast how in other parts of the world, this included disputes in universitiesor recently expanded to employment disputes in international institutions such as the UN, World Bank and IMF. In fact, my podcast even covered the ombuds of Pinterest. In other words, in many places, ombuds are a private initiative of an institution. Of course, some ombuds services concern the public services in general. However, in the UK, an Ombuds seems to be established to take care of a specific area. Whether this division of labor delivers efficiency or results is an open question that needs to be explored.