We assess cases to establish if there was maladministration, resulting in injustice or negative impact on the complainant. Maladministration can cover situations where people have been treated unfairly. This is not restricted to discrimination as defined in equalities legislation.
The Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) website explains what your choices are if you think you have been discriminated against. This includes information about the Equalities Advice and Support Service (EASS) who can give you advice and information. There are time limits for making a legal claim and if you are considering that option, you should take advice quickly.
Organisations usually comply with our recommendations, and we always follow up rigorously to make sure this happens. However, if an organisation did not comply, the Ombudsman can take action to draw attention to this.
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 sometimes receive multiple complaints about a council's decision to close a school or public facilities, or where members of a local community strongly oppose a planning application. If we decide to investigate how such a decision was made, we're very likely to take one generally representative complaint, investigate that and let the other complainants know the outcome.
No - we treat each complaint on its own merits. And our Act does not allow us to accept petitions or other broad based community representations.
We take the view that a single complaint made by an individual carries just as much weight as a group of people making a complaint. So when we get a large number of complaints about a particular issue, such as building a school or the closure of public facilities, we don’t treat the subject matter any differently from when someone brings us a complaint that only affects them.
We cannot accept complaints from community councils on their own behalf. Section 5 of the Scottish Public Services Ombudsman Act 2002 defines a ‘member of the public’. We took legal advice on this, and were advised that a community council is not a member of the public under the terms of the Act. A Scottish Parliamentary committee has also looked at this and confirmed that a community council cannot complain directly to us.
Any person or organisation who is a member of the public for the purposes of Section 5 (6) of the SPSO Act 2002. This excludes a number of public authorities, including local authorities. We can, however, take complaints from any customer of a licensed water or sewerage provider within our jurisdiction.
Ombudsmen deal with complaints from ordinary citizens about certain public bodies or organisations providing services on their behalf.
The SPSO looks into complaints about most organisations providing public services in Scotland. Our job is to give an independent and impartial decision on complaints and we also have a statutory role in improving complaints handling by organisations under our remit.
Most of the work of considering complaints is done by SPSO staff called Complaints Reviewers. We receive around 4000 complaints every year. The SPSO Act 2002 allows the Ombudsman to delegate functions, which means that she can ask other people to do things on his behalf, such as look at complaints.
The How we handle complaints section of this website explains how we look into complaints.