Moving forward, our priorities will be:

• continuing to improve the way we handle complaints from individuals;
• doing more to use the learning from our casework and our expertise to help improve public services for everyone;
• raising the public’s, media’s and Parliament’s awareness of our role and work, so that more people understand how our service could help them; and
• using our expertise and experience to influence Parliament and government to make it easier for people to make complaints.

We have begun a project to refresh our corporate strategy to help us fulfil these priorities.  As we have shown in this report, our performance over the last year is a strong platform that we can build on.  But there is still more for us to do.

Earlier this year, we began talking to our customers, our staff, public services, the general public and parliamentarians about how we can increase our impact.  These discussions are helping to shape our plans for the future. The ideas so far include:

• broadening and strengthening our relationship with Parliament;
• helping to make it easier and more straightforward for people to complain about public services;
• looking at new ways to gather information and data about complaints from people across society; and
• changing the law so that it is easier for people to come to us directly and so that we can examine potential systemic problems in public services.

We expect to publish our new strategy in autumn this year.