Our legislation says that we must carry out our investigations in private. We cannot comment on ongoing investigations and when we make reports public at the end of an investigation, we take care to anonymise individuals.
We put reports on our website to make the learning from complaints available to as wide an audience as possible. The aim is to help organisations pick up good practice from one another, and to decide whether they need to take action that may prevent the same issue from arising elsewhere. This also helps members of the public understand what we can and cannot look at, and the kind of recommendations we make.
We publish a small number of investigation reports in full (these are complaints that meet our public interest criteria) and we also publish the outcomes of 70-80 decisions a month (decision reports). These are on the our findings section of our website and can be searched by sector, organisation, subject and so on. We usually publish decision reports about six weeks after the complainant and the organisation concerned have received the final decision from our office.