IPSO – an Independent Press Standards Organisation – has announced plans to improve its focus on complaints that raise a potential breach of the Editors’ Code of Practice, following an amendment to its regulations that will give it greater discretion to make decisions about the handling of complaints that do not raise matters of regulatory concern.
The change being adopted will only affect complaints which raise no possible breach of the Editors’ Code of Practice – the framework of standards that IPSO uses to regulate the press. It says it will not change the service received by complainants who are raising concerns about coverage of them or their own contacts with journalists.
IPSO says an internal review of the process found that writing these bespoke letters took up a significant amount of the Complaints Team’s time which could have been used on handling complaints that were in remit or were under investigation.
The internal review of the handling of complaints found the complaints in question did not raise significant standards issues; and reducing numbers of tailored responses would free up capacity to focus on complaints of regulatory relevance, added IPSO.
Alice Gould, joint head of complaints and pre-publication services at IPSO, said: “With this change, we will be able to invest extra time into complaints which do raise a possible breach of the Code, improving the quality of our service in these cases. We will continue to make case-by-case decisions and send a bespoke response to people complaining about matters that have affected them personally, or where there is a public interest in doing so.”
IPSO says in accordance with its regulations and Scheme Membership Agreement, the change was approved by IPSO’s board, its regulated publishers, and the board of the Regulatory Funding Company which finances IPSO.
The amended Regulation 12 can be found here.
According to IPSO, many complaints that raise no possible breach of the Code will still receive tailored responses:
- if they are from people directly affected by an article;
- if the complainant is a representative or acting on behalf of a representative group, or the complainant is concerned about accuracy (under Clause 1) which relate to a specific person, but they do not have authority to act as their representative;
- or if a high volume of complaints is received.
IPSO will have discretion as to whether it is appropriate, necessary or within the public interest to send bespoke rejection letters to complaints which do not fall within the above categories.
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