Compliments & Complaints Annual Report 2022 to 2023

In his annual review report the Ombudsman notes the Council’s responsibility to drive improvements through complaints and that they have recommended more service improvements during 2022/23 than ever before. In total there have been 2,412 focused on delivering policy change, procedure review or staff training.

As part of the Ombudsman’s learning they issue Focus reports which we then consider when managing complaints. This year we saw such reports for children out of education, equalities and human rights and homelessness reduction.

Thirty-eight public interest reports were issued by the Ombudsman during 2022/23, none of these were for Buckinghamshire Council.

Education and Children’s Services have the highest number of upheld complaints for the Ombudsman, and he notes that this is a continuously growing area that now makes up nearly a quarter (24%) of the LGSCO’s workload, and sees the average uphold rate of complaints investigated tipping 84%.

The way the LGSCO triages cases has been changing over the last few years and they are looking at how best to manage their resource and increasing caseload. This has in turn lead to a higher uphold rate overall as they do not look at the more borderline cases. He notes, therefore, that comparing with previous year’s holds a note of caution.