A word from the Ombudsman, Michelle Morris

Welcome to the 5th edition of our newsletter.

It has now been over a year since I published my Strategic Plan 2023-26 ‘A New Chapter’ and I am pleased to see that we have started to make good progress towards achieving the ambitious goals set out in the plan.

Since April, my focus has been on rebuilding the reputation of the office, following the social media incident which called our impartiality into question. I was therefore pleased to receive the outcome of Dr Melissa McCulloch’s independent review of our Code of Conduct processes, delegations and decisions. I welcomed the confirmation that our decision making, in respect of Code of Conduct complaints, is free from political bias. Below I discuss the key findings from the report.

Again, we bring you a quick and easy-to-digest summary of our work between April and October 2024. Below, you will find summaries of our recent public interest and own initiative reports, our code of conduct referrals and key statistics from our Annual Report & Accounts for 2023/24.

Annual Report 2023/24

In August, we published our Annual Report & Accounts for 2023/24. The report showed a staggering 37% increase since 2019 in the number of new complaints we received about public services and the behaviour of local councillors.

2023/24 marked our most efficient year – we handled over 10,000 cases, closing more than we have ever have done before and reducing the costs for each case and investigation. We also successfully reduced our aging cases, those over 12 months old, by 70%, by the end of the year. These cases are often the most complex and distressing for the people making the complaint. We are now well on track to meeting the objective to complete all of these older cases by the end of March 2025.

Read our Annual Report & Accounts for 2023/24. 

Watch our Annual Report video: