A word from the Ombudsman, Michelle Morris 

Welcome to the 6th edition of our newsletter. 

We have now completed the second year of our Strategic Plan 2023-26 ‘A New Chapter’. Many actions set out under the Plan have now been delivered and we will continue to work towards our ambitious goals during 2025/26. 

We remain focused on rebuilding the reputation of the office, following the social media incident last year which called our impartiality into question. While an independent review of our investigation of Code of Conduct Complaints found that our decision making was appropriate, fair and free from political bias, it also made recommendations to improve the current safeguards for ensuring fairness and impartiality.   

Over the recent months, our focus has also been on the Finance Committee’s post-legislative review of the Public Services Ombudsman (Wales) Act 2019. The Act requires the Senedd to undertake a post-legislative review as soon as practicable after 21 May 2024 (that is, five years since the 2019 Act received Royal Assent). We have been busy assembling evidence on the impact of our proactive powers to accept complaints other than in writing; undertake investigations on own initiative; and set complaints standards. We have also been invited to speak to the Committee on 30 April. 

In the meantime, we again bring you a quick and easy-to-digest summary of our complaints and improvement work. We are not including in this edition of the newsletter our year-end complaints statistics, as the full details will be available in our Annual Report & Accounts for 2024/25. However, we provide summaries of our recent public interest reports and our Code of Conduct referrals, as well as details of our two recent thematic reports and our complaints standards work. 

It has been a busy year! Despite the challenges, we have a lot to be proud of. We are looking forward to sharing more evidence of our impact in our submission to the Senedd’s Finance Committee as well as discussing all areas of our performance in our next Annual Report.  

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