Our Triennial Review published
We have made four recommendations to Government on how we could improve the public services we oversee in our flagship Triennial Review.
The Review assesses the effectiveness of our service alongside the delivery of services in the local government and social care systems and suggests ways these could be improved.
The four areas where we would like to see improvements are:
- Services for children and young people with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities
- Complaints handling within the independent care sector, to include the need for the sector to signpost clients to us at the end of their complaints process
- Updating our jurisdiction to reflect modern local government systems, including those emerging through the devolution agenda
- Including a statutory duty to monitor compliance with our new Complaint Handling Code, which will be implemented from April 2026
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Link Officer and Complaint Manager Seminars
We held three seminars for local authorities in October and November to share learning from our investigations and encourage improvements in how they engage with our processes.
Seminars were held in Reading, Birmingham and Newcastle with 178 delegates attending from 112 local authorities. Delegates heard from our Ombudsman, Amerdeep Somal, about significant issues we are seeing in complaints about education, social care and homeless services and were given the opportunity to give feedback on the impact Ombudsman investigations have on local services.
We also spoke to delegates about our Complaint Handling Code and how this could be used to improve complaint handling in local authorities as well as how to use complaints data through local scrutiny arrangements.
Initial feedback about the seminars has been positive with many authorities reporting that they will be able to use the learning to improve working practices.
Guidance for working with adoptive families issued
We have issued guidance to councils to use when working with adoptive families.
Called ‘Children need Families’ the new report is aimed at helping to improve the support English councils provide to people throughout the adoption process, using real complaints we have investigated as examples of where things can and do go wrong.
Although we receive relatively few complaints from adoptive families, every single upheld case reflects a vulnerable child’s fresh start in life being affected by poor service from their council. This can either be in the support provided post-adoption, or the support and information given to potential adoptive parents.
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Did you know there are some limits on what we can look at?
We take our powers from the 1974 Local Government Act. This allows us to investigate the actions of local authorities and private care providers as well as some other public bodies.
However, the Act also places some limits on what complaints we can look at. This means that people are sometimes disappointed when raising a complaint with us when they find it is not something we can look at.
We have updated our website to provide more information about the types of complaints we are able to look at as well as those complaints we often receive which we have to decline.
We hope this information will help members of the public make an informed decision about whether their complaint is one we are able to look at. We have also asked local authorities to include a link to this webpage in their responses to complaints so members of the public have this information to hand when they receive the council's response.
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Chief Executive to retire
Our Chief Executive, Nigel Ellis, has announced he will retire in May 2025.
Mr Ellis has been our Chief Executive for eight years, having been Director of Operations prior to that. Before joining LGSCO he was in charge of investigations at the healthcare regulator and held a variety of roles in the voluntary sector.
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