Two pieces of our work have stayed with me recently, and I think they should stay with you too.

The first is our Annual Review of Local Government Complaints. The headline figure is stark: complaints to us rose by 33% this year, more than double last year's increase, and the rise is consistent across every service area we cover. I don't think this reflects one failing council or one failing service. It reflects something bigger: a widening gap between what people expect from public services and what they are able to receive.

The second is our end of life care report, No Second Chances. It tells the stories of people like Moira, Steve, Hazel and Eleanor, and the families who loved them, in the final days and hours of their lives. The failures we found were rarely about resources alone. They were about basic things going wrong: poor record keeping, confusion between services, communication handled without warmth or clarity. As the title suggests, when someone is dying, there is no second chance to get it right.

I see a common thread running through both reports. Whether it's a family navigating the SEND system, someone waiting for a housing decision, or a daughter trying to be with her mother in her last hours, trust is built or broken in the ordinary, practical details: being told the truth, being kept informed, having complaints heard and acted on rather than defended against.

That's why I keep returning to the basics. Good complaint handling isn't a bureaucratic add-on, it's a direct measure of whether an organisation is willing to learn and improve. Transparency, including publishing our decisions and holding authorities to account when they don't act on our findings, matters because people deserve to know when things have gone wrong and what is being done about it.

I'm also genuinely hopeful. The scale of local government reorganisation and devolution now under way is a real chance to redesign services around people, rather than around institutional silos that have persisted for decades. Reform takes time, but the families and children affected by today's failures cannot wait for tomorrow's benefits. Getting the basics right now, while building for the future, is not a distraction from reform. It is the foundation for it.