Putting things right

If we find that the council or care provider has done something wrong we can ask that body to take action to put the matter right. What we ask the body to do will depend on the particular complaint, how serious the fault was and how you have been affected by what has gone wrong.

The Ombudsmen have no legal power to force councils or care providers to follow their recommendations, but bodies almost always do.

Some of the things we might ask a body to do are:

• apologise to you
• make a payment
• reimburse costs or losses you may have been caused
• provide a service you should have had 
• do repairs to your council home
• take action or make a decision that it should have done before
• reconsider a decision that it did not take properly in the first place
• improve its procedures so that similar problems do not happen again to you or anyone else
• consider taking enforcement action against an unauthorised building close to your home, or against the unauthorised use of a building, or
• hold another school admission appeal hearing for your child.

Date Updated: 20/10/11