FAQs

These frequently asked questions are designed to assist authorities who have received an Ombudsman's annual letter.  If you want to know more about the information provided, or if you have another question please contact us.

The letter mentions ‘investigated and reported’ and ‘determined’ complaints. What’s the difference?
We determine most complaints by sending a letter setting out the issues raised and giving our decision.  ‘Investigated and reported’ complaints are those where we carried out a formal investigation and laid a report before the Scottish Parliament.  ‘Determined’ complaints are those on which we have given the complainant a decision (by report or letter) and closed our file, regardless of whether or not the complaint went to formal investigation.

‘Investigated and reported’ complaints are included in the total of ‘determined’ cases.

What happens to cases that are determined by letter without a formal report being laid before Parliament?
In many, we are likely to have investigated the complaint to some extent by obtaining more information before deciding it's not appropriate for a report to Parliament.  Once we've done that, we send a decision letter to the complainant and to the authority concerned.  This normally means that we did not find issues in the complaint that were significant enough to raise in a public report. In many cases we will, however, have achieved an informal outcome on the complaint, and may have made recommendations to the authority about issues raised by the complaint.

How do you define a premature complaint?
It's a complaint that's been sent to us too early - i.e. before it has completed the complaints process of the authority it's about. 

Can you ever take a complaint before it completes the authority’s process?
Yes, but only where we think the circumstances are appropriate. The most likely examples would be where the authority has delayed unreasonably in responding to the complaint, or where the person who’s complained appears to be particularly vulnerable. But this only happens in a very small number of cases. Most people have to complete the authority’s process to allow the authority to respond to the matters raised.

My authority doesn’t seem to know about all of the complaints that you’ve counted as premature. Why?
There are several possible reasons. We don’t write to authorities about all the premature cases we receive (see the next FAQ for more information about this). And when we refer someone back to the complaints process, the authority may resolve the matter to the person’s satisfaction without necessarily knowing that it came prematurely to us.

Or the person may decide not to take it further after we’ve told them they need to go through the authority’s process. People often bring issues to us that are both premature and outwith our jurisdiction, or that we won’t take up because they are asking for an outcome that we can’t achieve. We’ll tell them that we’re not looking at it because it’s premature, but also explain that even if they go through the authority’s process, it’s unlikely we’d take the complaint up in the circumstances described. For example if they’re asking us to change an unwelcome planning decision or if it’s a personnel-related matter we’d explain that these were things that we couldn’t do, whether or not they went through the authority’s process. It’s then for the complainant to decide what to do next.

When do you tell authorities about premature complaints?
We determine many of these very quickly (within one or two days of receiving them). This normally happens where the complaint has clearly come to us too early and there’s little or no information with it. We record these on our computer system, but don’t open a paper file. In most such cases we simply send the letter back to the person with a postcard telling them that they've sent the complaint to us too soon and that they need to complain to the relevant authority. We don’t normally write to the authority about these, and usually have minimal information about the complaint ourselves.

Where more information is provided but the complaint doesn’t seem to have completed the authority’s complaints process, we’ll also open a paper file. We’d normally send both the complainant and the authority a letter in these cases. We tell the authority that the matter has come to us too early, and that we’ve told the complainant to go back to them about it. We then close our file, which we can reopen if the person later brings the complaint back to us.

Can you provide a more detailed breakdown of the premature complaints received for my authority?
We can provide numbers and general categories of complaints received prematurely. These are broken down into two areas – complaints that do not appear to have been made to the authority at all and those that have started, but not finished, the authority’s process. (We don’t record which point in the authority process they've reached.)
We can usually identify the department and subject matter involved but at this early stage, the categorisation may not be entirely accurate because of lack of information.