Buckley was appointed as Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman to succeed Sir William Reid and took up the post in January 1997.

As a priority, Buckley sought to eliminate the backlog of casework which had accumulated without affecting the quality of investigations undertaken by the Office.

Buckley complained that the refusal to release the information 'strikes at the very heart of my office's function and effectively made my investigation unsustainable'.

[3] Buckley had sought a transcript of a disputed telephone call between Mandelson and the Home Office Minister Mike O'Brien about the affair.

[4] The most notable Parliamentary case handled by the Office during Buckley's term as Ombudsman concerned complaints about the actions of the Department of Social Security in connection with SERPS.

The Secretary of State for Social Security, Alistair Darling accepted the report and announced that the changes to the inheritance provisions would be postponed until 2002 and that the Government would establish a scheme which would protect the pensions rights of those who had been misinformed.

After a Select Committee report, the scheme was abandoned and Darling announced a new set of proposals giving full protection to every pensioner and introducing a transitional arrangement for those approaching retirement age.

In it, he expressed satisfaction that the Government's proposals would correct the effects of past maladministration, giving time for those approaching retirement to adjust their financial arrangements.

[5] Buckley replicated the practice of delegation for health investigations, arguing that it was a necessary decision given the increasing numbers of complaints about clinical judgment, which had only just been brought within the remit of the Ombudsman.

Buckley developed a more business-orientated approach to the handling of health cases and oversaw a smooth transition to coping with the extended jurisdiction over clinical judgment matters.

There is a larger and more flexible range of tools for dealing with complaints... there have been fundamental changes in organisation, in employment policies, in training and development'.