The process explained
The Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman's process for dealing with complaints.
Assessment
We receive a large number of enquiries from the public. These can be by telephone and email, in person as well as in writing. All of them have first to be appropriately assessed. We are not able, and are not required, to accept them all for investigation.
When we receive your complaint, we will acknowledge your complaint within two working days. You will be given a reference number which should be quoted in any future contact with the Ombudsman.
Our first step will be to look at whether the complaint is one that we can handle, because we can only investigate complaints where we have the legal power to do so.
We will carry out a series of simple, preliminary checks to ensure that the complaint is one which falls within the terms of our legislation. If it does not, then we aim to explain why, and if possible, help the complainant resolve their complaint effectively by a different route.
You do not have an automatic right to have your complaint investigated but if we decide not to do so, we will let you know why we have made that decision. We are committed to keeping you informed about progress and will be in touch regularly to update you.
Local resolution
Once we are clear that the complaint is one that falls within our jurisdiction, we need to check whether it has completed the local complaints process.
It is important that public bodies get the opportunity to put things right before PHSO considers the matter. If they have not had that opportunity, we consider such a complaint to have come to us prematurely, and we will generally decline to investigate it at that point and ask people to make full use of the local complaints process. That would include putting the complaint to an arms-length departmental complaint handler such as the Department for Work and Pensions’ Independent Case Examiner.
Putting things right
Once a complaint has satisfied preliminary checks, we then move on to our more detailed assessment of the complaint.
In order to be able to begin an investigation, we must first satisfy ourselves that there is some evidence of administrative fault or of service failure. If we cannot see any indication of either of these, then we will not investigate the complaint and will explain this to the complainant.
Where we are satisfied that there is an indication of administrative fault or of service failure, the next test to be applied is to see whether injustice or hardship has flowed from it.
Finally, if both of those criteria are satisfied, we consider whether there is a reasonable prospect of an investigation by PHSO leading to a worthwhile outcome.
At this point, we may well decide that the evidence of maladministration by the body concerned leading to an unremedied injustice is so clear that we might not need to launch an investigation to find out what happened, but instead we can work with the relevant parties to achieve a satisfactory resolution.
Investigation
If we have completed the steps above and are not able to settle things quickly by an intervention, we may conduct a thorough and in-depth investigation. Every investigation must be focused on the specific complaint. Every investigation is different and can have different implications. For examples of some of the cases we have completed, please see our Annual Reports.
