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Number of complaints and enquiries decided by the Local Government & Social Care Ombudsman (10449) Metric type
- Help text
- This is the total number of decisions on complaints and enquiries made by the Local Government & Social Care Ombudsman (LGSCO), formerly the Local Government Ombudsman (LGO). These include where advice was given, the case was closed after initial enquiries, where the complaint was incomplete/invalid, where it was referred back for local resolution and detailed investigations, where complaints were either upheld or not upheld. A number of cases will have been received and decided in different business years, this means the number of complaints and enquiries received will not always match the number of decisions made.
The LGSCO can look at individual complaints about councils, all adult social care providers (including care homes and home care agencies) and some other organisations providing local public services.
The LGSCO is a free service. It investigates complaints in a fair and independent way. It does not take sides. The LGSCO can look at complaints about things that have gone wrong in the way a service has been given or the way a decision has been made, if this has caused problems. The areas it can look at includes administrative fault, such as the council making a mistake or not following its own rules; poor service or no service; delay; bad advice.
LGSCO advise caution when using these statistics to monitor the performance of organisations because the number of new cases received does not simply depend on the number of problems people have with local services. There are lots of other factors to consider.
Demographics: An organisation that serves a large population is likely to see more complaints. This could also influence the kind of complaints that are made. For example, a community that includes a high proportion of older people may raise more complaints about adult social care services.
Local conditions: Sometimes, one-off events can generate multiple complaints about the same organisation. For example, there may be several complaints from people who oppose a council's decision to grant planning permission for a large housing development.
Expectations: Not everyone who receives a poor service goes on to raise a complaint and some people are less likely to complain than others. So a fall in the number of received complaints may reflect lower expectations rather than an improvement in services.
Signposting: A high number of received complaints might reflect an organisation that is good at letting people know they can ask for an independent investigation.
- Modified
- 17 Oct 2022
- Data last updated
- 11 Nov 2022
- Short label
- Number of decisions on complaints made by the Ombudsman
- Status
- Live
- Output precision
- 0
- Polarity
- not applicable
- Measure
- Decisions
- Dataset
- Decisions made
- Collection
- Local government complaint reviews
- Source
- Local Government & Social Care Ombudsman
- is found in the following lists
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