Festive closure 

Our office will be closed for the festive period from 25 December 2025 and will reopen on Monday 5 January 2026. Our phone line will close at 11am on 24 December 2025.

You can still submit your complaint via our online form but this will not be processed until we reopen.

SPSO Annual Report 2017-18

Today we are publishing our Annual Report for the year 2017-18.

The Ombudsman, Rosemary Agnew, is delighted to report a strong performance and the office’s many significant achievements over the year. These included: clearing our backlog of cases, laying our new strategic plan before Parliament, issuing our report “Making Complaints Work for Everyone” and positive engagement with a wide range of stakeholder.

2017–18 also saw us achieve a major milestone with the NHS being the final sector to implement model complaint handling procedures.  This means all Scottish public services now take the same, two-stage approach to complaints handling.

Our complaint handling performance at a glance:

  • We handled 904 enquiries
  • We received 4,125 and closed 4,226 complaints
  • We upheld 58.8% of complaints
  • We made 635 recommendations about learning and improvement, 448 recommendations to provide individual remedy for an aggrieved person and 109 recommendations to improve complaints handling performance of public bodies.
  • We closed 97.1% of complaints within 260 days against a target of 95%

Updated: July 1, 2019