Councils and care providers agreed to 1,967 recommendations targeted at improving services in 2021-22.

In its Annual Report and Accounts 2021-22, the Ombudsman said that service improvement recommendations typically comprised actions such as: changing policies and procedures, reviewing other people’s cases for potential injustice, training staff and enhancing public information about services. 

The Ombudsman concentrated on working through cases to reduce its backlog, leading to it significantly increasing the amount of initial investigations it made within 20 working days.

Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman, Michael King, said: “I’m very pleased we made great strides in improving the speed of our initial investigations last year. The quicker we decide whether we can or should look into someone’s complaint, the quicker people have certainty about their situation.

“The plan we introduced, to get our casework onto a sustainable footing, means we can focus on reducing waiting times in the short term, but not at the cost of equally important work to share the learning from our investigations. A fantastic example of how important this work continues to be is the Focus Report we published on Covid-19, which I’m hugely proud of.”

The Covid-19 report details how councils and care providers responded to the upheavals to service delivery because of the pandemic, which includes some 90 case studies from the Ombudsman’s investigation.

In 2021-22, the Ombudsman dealt with a total of 49,625 complaints and enquiries from the public. Of this, 32,091 people received help on the telephone without requiring a case to be logged.

Of the 17,534 cases the Ombudsman decided, 6,607 were dealt with by an initial investigation, mainly looking at whether the Ombudsman can and should investigate in more detail. It dealt with 4,253 cases through a detailed investigation, of which it upheld 66% (2,825 in number).