Complaint Handling Guides Launched

Ombudsman launches good practice guides for handling and managing complaints

We have launched five good practice guides on complaint handling to support local councils and other organisations to successfully adopt our Complaint Handling Code, alongside managing other complaints processes.

The guides have been developed in consultation with a group of councils who have been piloting the Complaint Handling Code. They are based on real-life, front-line experience of people handling complaints day-to-day in a wide range of councils, as well as their experience of discussing complaints with senior leaders and elected members.

The guides are aimed at specific roles within the complaint process to make the most of learning from the experience of the pilot councils and wider best practice.

You can now find the following guides on our website:

Complaint handlers: a proportionate approach to complaints
Complaint managers: designing and delivering effective complaints systems
Statutory officers & senior leaders: a guide to effective oversight of complaint systems
Members responsible for complaints: a guide to effective scrutiny of complaint systems
Managing complaints in contracted and commissioned services: a good practice guide

These guides replace our previous publication on effective complaint handling published in 2020. Please discard any copies you have.

These guides are designed to be read on our website and each has a search function to allow you to find relevant content based on key words or phrases. We have also made the guides available as plain text PDF downloads alongside copies of our other good practice guides. These can be accessed here.

The relevant guides should be shared with:

Elected members responsible for scrutinising complaints
Chief executives and monitoring officers
Complaint managers
Anyone who may be asked to respond to a complaint
Anyone with responsibility for contracting and commissioning services on behalf of your council.

We will be publishing some free material for councils in the coming months to help raise staff awareness of the Code and complaint handling responsibilities. We will provide more details of this in a future edition of Ombudsman link.

Read the guides

Adult social care complaints: Good practice guide published

Today we have published a good practice guide on handling complaints and appeals about adult social care services.

The guide explains local council duties under the Local Authority Social Services and National Health Service Complaints (England) Regulations 2009 which sets out how complaints about adult social care services must be handled.

We have issued the guide after finding that a number of councils were unaware of the legislation around handling adult social care complaints and we continue to see councils operating two stage complaints processes, despite the legislation only allowing for a single stage.

Our guide sets out a suggested model for handling complaints which allows councils to try to resolve complaints early before moving on to having a closer look at issues raised where this is not possible. This approach mirrors the process set out in the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman’s (PHSO) NHS Complaint Standards and supports joint working on complaints where appropriate.

The guide should be shared with your director of adult social care, adult social care managers and anyone responsible for managing or responding to adult social care complaints.

Simplifying our draft decision format

We are about to make small changes to the standard draft decision template we use at investigation (not assessment) stage decisions.

Our draft decisions will continue to state “Draft Decision” at the top of the statement, and in the watermark. Decision summaries should all include the phrase ‘Based on current evidence’ in the summary, again to emphasise the draft nature of all that follows.

However, the rest of the statement will now not normally include other references to it being in draft. For example, where draft decisions included a section “Draft recommendations”, it will now be titled “Actions". This does not change our practice of issuing draft decisions at investigation stage, and of carefully considering comments and further evidence received before issuing a final decision or further draft decisions.

These changes are to save investigator time and reduce the risk of mistakenly leaving draft/tentative language in our final decisions.

If you have any questions about this please contact Cameron Black our External Training & Relationship Lead.

Join our complaint handler network

Did you know we have a network for complaint handers?

The network is an online forum where officers and managers responsible for local authority complaints can ask each other for help and advice and share ideas and learning.

The network is managed by Cameron Black, our External Training & Relationship Lead who will also take part in discussions.

The network is not limited to specific topics. Recent discussions have covered a range of issues from statutory children's complaints to monitoring equality data through complaints systems.

Join the network