Statistics

Our annual statistics can be accessed by clicking the links below.
All reports are in PDF format.  if you have difficulty reading this information please contact us.

Please note that if you intend to compare 2007-08 statistics with previous years, it is important to read about the changes we made to recording in April 2007. These changes are explained in the Changes to Recording section. We have also now started to record information about the outcomes of complaints on which we made a decision but did not report publicly (see 2010-11 below) . There have been no other significant changes to our recording methods since 2007-08

Annual Totals 
 
Click here to see tables of the total annual number of enquiries and complaints we received from April 2003 onwards. From April 2004, these show the proportion of complaints received about each of the sectors under our jurisdiction - health, local government, housing, the Scottish Executive/ Scottish Government and devolved administration, and further and higher education. 

Further and higher education came under our remit in October 2005, and complaints from prisoners from 1 October 2010.  Complaints from prisoners will be included in Scottish Government sector totals from 2010-11 onwards.

You can access more details about complaints received and resolved since April 2004 by clicking on the links below:

2010 -11 Scroll down for statistics

"Too many authorities are getting complaints wrong first time, rather than right first time"

The Ombudsman’s key message from the 2010-11 annual statistics is to service providers about the quality of service provision and complaints handling procedures.  Too many authorities are getting complaints wrong first time, rather than right first time.  When making decisions on complaints in 2010-11, we upheld or partly upheld 34% of all the complaints that were valid for SPSO (i.e. cases that had completed the organisation’s complaints process and were within our jurisdiction).  To put this another way, in over a third of cases that had already been investigated by the local service provider - through multiple, often lengthy stages of review and appeal - that provider got something wrong.  This clearly demonstrates a need for change, and through our Complaints Standards Authority we are working with organisations in the various sectors under jurisdiction to simplify processes and improve complaints handling. It is not possible to make a direct comparison between this 2010-11 figure and figures for previous years.  This is because we only began to record the outcomes of decisions (other than those in published investigation reports) in this way after Jim Martin, the current Ombudsman, took office in May 2009.

2010 -11 

2009 - 10

2008 - 09

2007 - 08

2006 - 07

2005 - 06

2004 - 05
 

Please note that no further details are available for 2003-04 or earlier.

Outcomes
Outcomes relate not just to the investigation reports we send to the Scottish Parliament, but to the full range of responses we make to the complaints we receive.  We now record and publish the outcome of all the complaints we receive, to share the learning from our work as widely as possible and so improve the delivery of public services.  To see explanations of the different outcomes, please see the Explanation of Terms section.

For more information about how an authority can make a request for us to investigate a complaint under 'Section 2(2)' of the Ombudsman Act, please click here.

 

Last updated 25 November 2011