Last month we published our new Three-Year Plan. This sets out what we want to achieve over the next three years - our 'vision of the future'.

The Plan is split into four commitments. These will define our work over the period while ensuring we remain focused on our primary aims of remedying injustice and helping to improve local services:

• Being a high achieving organisation
• Being a great place to work
• Being bold and innovative to maximise our impact
• Being accessible to all

Michael King, Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman, said:

"The Plan is both ambitious and optimistic, while also being grounded, realistic, and achievable. Most importantly, it is firmly rooted in our core work of investigating complaints. Our Plan is as much about achieving the best we can in our everyday work and sharing the learning from complaint cases, as it is about developing new ideas."

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We are starting to see a steady influx of cases where COVID-19 has been a factor in the complaint.

Looking at all the cases so far, Benefits and Tax make up the largest percentage, with 45% of cases decided so far being about this. This month we published a report about problems we found in the way one council administered its discretionary business grant scheme last year.

We were asked to investigate the district council's handling of its scheme by two separate businessmen. We found a lack of transparency with the way it recorded how it decided the level of grants businesses would receive, and also found a lack of record keeping explaining the council’s individual decisions and inconsistent decision making. 

Read about the case here

Sometimes we are asked whether our recommendations to put things right should be legally binding. Councils not complying is extremely rare (we have more than 99% compliance), but ultimately our recommendations also pay respect to local democracy and the decisions of councils.

Here’s an interesting example of this happening in practice, in Cornwall, for the benefit of local people. We had published a Public Interest Report about the council incorrectly assessing a man’s financial ability to pay for his care. Because we uncovered a procedural error, we recommended the council review other cases to ensure nobody else was also unfairly treated.

When that report was considered at the council’s standards committee, rather than agreeing to officers’ proposals to refuse our recommendation, local councillors insisted officers commit to writing to people potentially affected and reviewing a dip sample of cases. This is a great example of democratic accountability in action, showing how elected representatives can influence how services are provided locally, by using the learning from our casework.

See more on scrutiny support for councillors

We take the learning from the complaints we receive and use that information to inform government consultations.

Using what we have learned, we submitted a response to the Department for Education's consultation on Changes to the School Admission Code. 

Our response to this consultation focused on the complaints we get around in-year admissions and fair access protocols.

The government has published its response to the consultation and is now moving forward with many of the proposals in the original consultation. We will continue to work with the department to offer input where needed.

Read our submission

We use what we learn from complaints in our training programme, to help councils and care providers improve their complaint handling.

Last year we were forced to suspend in person delivery of our training programme due to COVID-19. We re-designed the course for online delivery and started online workshops in October 2020. Despite only delivering courses for half of the year we delivered 79 online courses in six months. Our online training has received universally positive feedback, with 80% of delegates saying it improved their practice and directly contributed to their work; with the remaining 20% saying it confirmed existing good practice.

Moving to online delivery has made it possible for us to deliver more courses per month than in person and easier for councils and care providers to attend the training programme.

Read about our online training