The ombudsman investigated four cases where The Inspectorate had refused to compensate individuals or organisations for mistakes that had caused the parties to incur extra costs through no fault of their own.
In each of the four cases, The Inspectorate told those affected that it would not offer compensatory payments unless the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman recommended that it do so.
The Inspectorate took this hard line approach because it had taken the decision to abolished its ex-gratia payment scheme in March 2011 as a cost cutting measure designed to contribute towards the organisation's need to make overall savings of around £9 million per year.
The Ombudsman concluded that The Inspectorate's approach to remedying complaints in the absence of a formal scheme was not acceptable.
"The decision not to pay financial remedies without a recommendation from the Ombudsman meant that the Planning Inspectorate expected individual people, in most cases, to bear the costs of mistakes made by the Planning Inspectorate. That was unfair and unjust"
The inspectorate ended up paying compensation totalling more than £100,000 to the complainants - with almost half of that figure accounted for by MAZE Planning's complaint, which related to the handling of enforcement appeals for a motocross track in the Lancashire Green Belt.
In light of the four cases, the Ombudsman recommended, and The Inspectorate accepted, that it should revisit 14 further complaints where compensation had been refused solely as a result of the closure of the ex-gratia payment scheme.
As a result of the report The Inspectorate made further compensatory payments, apologised to the parties involved and said that it had reintroduced the ex-gratia payment scheme to enable financial redress to be provided in appropriate circumstances.
The Ombudsman's report, A false economy: investigations into how people are recompensed for government mistakes is available here
A copy of the case specific report issued to MAZE Planning's client can be made available to interested parties - please email your request to Andrew Watt