Improving access to our service
Everyone should be able to use our service without facing unnecessary barriers. We know complaints affect people from some groups and communities differently. Our strategy for 2025 to 2026 includes our commitment to making our service fairer and more accessible. We will create a diverse and inclusive environment where everyone can feel able to bring their complaints to us.
‘The people who need our service have often been through traumatic experiences. It is vital that they are able to find us in the moments that matter and that we make it as easy as possible for them to submit complaints.’ Our strategy 2025 to 2026
We know people’s experiences of public services can differ. For example, almost four times as many black women die in childbirth compared to white women (Black maternal health’, Women and Equalities Committee).
Studies also demonstrate that Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities experience difficulties accessing services.
‘The majority shared negative experiences [of public services]. In health, people spoke of being turned away by frontline health services.’ Traveller Movement
‘Levels of knowledge about mental health and access to services were found to be low and inconsistent... [literacy levels were] a huge barrier to the take up of help.' NHS Race and Observatory
We want to understand why there are differences for these groups and others and what the barriers are for translating their experiences into complaints.
We now ask people who bring complaints to us to provide information including their age and their ethnicity. We will use this data to better understand who uses our service and will do more work to understand who does not and why. We will share this summary data to be transparent.
In our report ‘Complaints that come to us too early’ we learned that just under half of the people who complain to us found it easy. The people we spoke to said the level of detail needed when completing the form, and the complex language, made it harder to complain. This included people who spoke English as a second language or had a long-term health condition.
We want to make sure it is easier for everyone to complain. We will continue to assess how we do this and what changes we may need to make to our process. One way in which we are already doing this is by expanding our digital self-service so people can submit complaints online.
We want to work with people who find it hard to access our service to understand why, so that we can make it easier for them to come to us. To do this, we will use our engagement work to understand what barriers are currently in place and how we can remove these to improve access. We will use our data and work with different groups to make sure we have the impact we want.
‘Spotlight on the Windrush Compensation Scheme’ report
Our Windrush report highlighted cases where people trying to access the Compensation Scheme had experienced long delays in getting a decision.
As of March 2024, the Compensation Scheme had received 7,688 claims. Since we started getting complaints about the Compensation Scheme in 2021, we have only received around 50. We want to better understand why so few complaints came to us and how we can improve this.