Annual review letters

We write to councils and other authorities within our jurisdiction each year to feedback on performance and share key data.

We report the following data for each authority:  

• Complaints dealt with – the total number of complaints and enquiries considered. It is not appropriate to investigate all of them.
• Not for us – includes complaints brought to us before the council was given chance to consider it, or the complainant came to the wrong Ombudsman.
• Assessed and closed – includes complaints where the law says we’re not allowed to investigate, or it would be a poor use of public funds if we did.
• Investigated – we completed an investigation and made a decision on whether we found fault, or no fault.
• Complaints upheld – We completed an investigation and found evidence of fault, or the organisation provided a suitable remedy early on.
• Satisfactory remedies provided by the Council – the council upheld the complaint and we agreed with how it offered to put things right.
• Compliance with Ombudsman recommendations – not complying with our recommendations is rare. A council with a compliance rate below 100% should scrutinise the complaints where it failed to comply and identify any learning.
• Average performance rates – we compare the annual statistics of similar types of councils to work out an average level of performance. We do this for County Councils, District Councils, Metropolitan Boroughs, Unitary Councils, and London Boroughs.

You can find more information on understanding our date on our website (Interpreting our complaints data)

We issue authorities their annual letters and publish performance data for all English councils on our interactive map in May.

Annual letters are addressed to the Chief Executive and copied to the dedicated Link Officer we have on file. Letters are copied to the authority’s Monitoring Officer (where they have provided their details) and, where available, to a Member Services email address for forwarding the Leader and any other relevant person responsible for scrutiny of the authority’s performance. In July, we write to those authorities where we have identified concerns with complaint handling or where we want to highlight exceptional practice.

All letters are then published on our website later in July.

These letters and the key data we publish place on record, and in the public domain, our experience of each authority, supporting organisations to better understand their performance, to improve their complaint handling, and local public services.

Link Officers can use the letter to raise the profile of complaints resolution, highlighting areas for improvement and sharing successes, initiating discussions and agreeing actions with key officers and elected members. The data we publish about others can be used to compare performance with neighbouring authorities.

In July we publish an annual review report looking at the state of local government complaints, and the release of our data in spreadsheet format.