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