2025 is likely to see the start of significant change in councils across the country: the Government is keen to give more power to local areas and to see local authorities reorganise to give a more streamlined approach.

These changes, likely to start becoming visible from 2026 onwards, may change who is responsible for - and provides - the local services on which people rely. We are working to make sure that we can provide a route of redress which covers the planned reform, as it is vital that the Ombudsman continues to be able to oversee these local services. To that end we are discussing our views on the Government’s proposals, and our priorities as laid out in our Triennial Review, with officials across Whitehall departments.

There is also a lot of national discussion on the support provided to children with special educational needs and disabilities, and again we are taking an active role in those conversations to ensure the evidence we see from our casework is considered. We continue to raise the issues we see in Adult Social Care services, and to press our belief that all social care providers – including those who provide services for people who pay for their own social care - need to be legally required to signpost to us.

The amount of work coming to us remains high and we are building on our already excellent efficiency to look at complaints in a timely way. Alongside this we are continuing our work to help the organisations we oversee to manage their complaints effectively: new guides for councils will be issued in the next few months on how they can apply our Complaint Handling Code in a way which best serves local people.

Amerdeep Somal,

Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman

We recently laid our Annual Report and Accounts before Parliament for the 2023-24 year.

It is a key document in how we maintain our transparency and make ourselves accountable for our performance, which involves being audited by the National Audit Office.

While, by their nature, annual reports are retrospective documents, our report serves as a useful summary of the challenges and achievements we have seen in the last year.

The 2023-24 period encompassed our 50th year anniversary, and the launch of our first complaint handling code for local authorities. We also had an independent review of our service, which remarked on how efficient and high performing we are, despite having to manage being underfunded.

We hit our longer time targets on completing investigations, but highlighted the biggest challenge being an increasing number of new complaints registered with us, which made it more difficult to assess new investigations as quickly as we would like.

Read the report

If you are concerned about potholes in your local area which have not been repaired, or believe your car has been damaged by a pothole your council should already have filled, we have a factsheet that may be of interest to you.

 We also have other have factsheets on our website to explain what we can and cannot investigate relating to other highways-related services.

Read our factsheets