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 you resolve your 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 organisations get the opportunity to put things right before we consider the matter. If they have not had that opportunity, we will generally decline to investigate it at that point and ask you 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 investigate it.
We may find that we can get your problem resolved quickly by talking to the organisation you’re unhappy about.
In other cases, we will carry out an investigation and we will look in detail at what’s happened.
- We’ll look at all the facts.
- We might need to gather additional evidence and information by speaking to you and the organisation concerned.
- We might need to get expert advice.
Every complaint is different and the steps we take in our investigation will vary.
How we can help resolve complaints
Clear explanation
We might decide that the organisation have acted correctly or that there was a problem but they’ve already done enough to put things right.
We’ll explain why we’ve decided this. Often that means sharing any expert advice we’ve had.
Getting things put right
If we find that the organisation have done something wrong that needs to be put right, we’ll work with them to get that done. This could mean acknowledging their mistake, apologising, paying compensation and/or preventing the same mistake happening again. We always follow up to see they do this.
Find out more
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 published reports.
