Dear Fire and Emergency New Zealand,

Thank you for the link to the Shaw Report in the partial response to my other OIA.

I see that at the time the Shaw Report team were working on the report (2018) (4 years ago): "FENZ does not yet have a process to systematically collect accessible data on how many issues, complaints, grievances and/or disputes arise across FENZ regarding bullying and harassment."

And: "The lack of any systematic data collection and case management system hampers a full understanding of the extent of the bullying and harassment issues faced by both the organisation and individuals."

And: "There is no case management system for dealing with bullying and harassment cases."

1. Do you actually record complaints etc now?

I see in Recommendation 19, it is recommended that: … FENZ develops and implements a system of capturing and recording all issues, complaints, grievances and/or disputes regarding bullying and harassment.

And: "Whatever process is adopted it must: … maintain appropriate and confidential records of each reported complaint, including its outcome"

And: "Apart from the opportunity to have matters dealt with at an early stage, the benefits to FENZ of such a service [early intervention 0800 line] would be information and statistics that can be used to establish patterns of behaviour, to inform education, training and awareness campaigns as well as wider cultural change initiatives."

I also see that the report quotes a lot of participants who say they wanted better recording of complaints, including them to be tracked and monitored etc.

2. How do you implement Recommendation 19 in practice?

3. I note that the Recommendation clearly refers to more than written complaints and includes issues regardless of whether they were reported to HR or not, or reported at all in fact. Please specifically detail how FENZ captures the following issues in its statistics:
- issues it is aware of, where no person has made a formal complaint
- issues that are reported informally or formally to chiefs.

4. The Report states: “On request, People and Capability provided the review with information about issues raised or categorised specifically as bullying or harassment since 1 July 2017. However, this information had to be especially sourced and collated to meet the request."
Your answer to my last OIA (that you have to search through a large quantify of information for my extremely basic request) shows that you are apparently still choosing (4 years later) to specially source and collate stats when people make OIA requests. Why is this the case? Why don't you have this crucial information (that you should be using to inform and monitor your disputes handling) to hand?

Yours sincerely,

Mark MacDonald