Why complaints won't wait for reform

Adult social care is operating under sustained pressure. We know workforce shortages, rising demand and constrained budgets are the daily reality for directors and their teams and this year's Annual Review of Adult Social Care Complaints reflects that context. But it also reflects something else: the improvements available to councils right now, independent of the wider adult social care reform agenda.The Prime Minister has spoken of a National Care Service and Baroness Louise Casey's Big Conversation on Care is under way. These are significant undertakings, and rightly so.But adult social care reform of this scale takes years to deliver and the people relying on care and support today cannot wait for it. Our findings this year point to four areas where councils can act immediately, using tools and levers that are already within their control.More complaints does not always mean more problemsFirst, the volume and pattern of complaints demands strategic attention, not just operational management. We received 3,938 complaints about adult social care this year – a 22% increase on the previous year. This rise should not automatically be read as evidence of failing services, it may equally reflect growing public awareness of the right to complain. What matters more is where the growth is concentrated.Safeguarding complaints saw the sharpest percentage increase of any category we track, while assessment and care planning generated the highest volume overall. Directors should be examining whether their own organisation's complaint trends mirror this national pattern and where they diverge, understanding why.This is not a task that can be delegated indefinitely to operational teams. It belongs on the same risk registers and governance agendas as financial and workforce pressures, and should be reviewed with the same regularity.We also saw a 10% rise in complaints from people who fund their own care – a welcome sign of growing awareness among this group of their right to bring a complaint to us. But the numbers remain low, relative to what we would expect, given the size of the market.Councils have a role here too, particularly through commissioning relationships and safeguarding duties in ensuring self-funders know this route exists.Early action means less costsSecond, the sector's overall record on remedying fault is strong and speed of resolution is now the clearest differentiator between good and average practice.Organisations complied with our recommendations in 99.8% of cases and agreed actions were delivered on time in 85% of cases, an improvement on the previous year.This is evidence of a system that responds constructively to independent scrutiny. However, the more instructive finding sits beneath the headline figures.Among complaints about privately-arranged care, the proportion of upheld cases where the provider had already offered a suitable remedy before we investigated rose by 13 percentage points this year.Early, decisive resolution reduces harm to the person affected and reduces the organisational cost of prolonged disputes. Where complaints processes still route every case through a lengthy formal procedure regardless of severity, that represents an unnecessary and avoidable cost, one that can be addressed through internal process change alone without waiting for adult social care reform.Good governance mattersThird, the failures serious enough to result in a public investigation report are rarely complex. They are almost always avoidable through better administrative discipline.We issued three investigation reports this year. None of the cases behind those reports, nor the case studies elsewhere in this review, involved a genuinely difficult professional judgement. They involved a care package increased without proper reassessment or written notice, a complaints response that failed to explain how to escalate a concern further and a three-month delay before a final response was issued on a case where fault had already been acknowledged. These are governance gaps, not resourcing crises, and they can be closed without additional investment.Every complaints procedure, both within the council and among commissioned providers, should visibly and correctly signpost to my office once internal processes are exhausted. Complaint timeliness data should be reviewed by someone senior enough to act on it, not left to sit unexamined in a quarterly report.Do you know what your commissioned services are doing?Fourth, complaints data should sit at the heart of commissioning services. Where a council contracts a third party to provide care, we treat that provider's actions as the council's own for the purposes of our investigations, whatever the contractual arrangements say. This means the volume, nature and outcome of complaints about a commissioned provider can tell a council directly about the quality of the service it is purchasing on residents' behalf, not just about that provider's internal administration. Too often, this intelligence sits with the team managing individual complaints and never reaches the officers responsible for contract management and future procurement decisions.Complaint data about a provider, including trends in upheld complaints, repeat issues and delays in remedy, should be a standing feature of contract review meetings and a factor in decisions about recommissioning or retendering. A provider with a poor or worsening complaints record is telling a council something important about the risk it is carrying well before that risk shows up in a safeguarding referral or a public report.Councils that build this feedback loop into routine commissioning practice will identify struggling providers earlier and will be better placed to act, whether through support, contract management, or a change of provider before harm escalates.None of these four actions requires new legislation, new funding, or the outcome of a national conversation that is still in progress. They require councils to treat their own complaints data as a live source of operational and commissioning intelligence, reviewed at the right level and acted upon promptly.Adult social care reform will eventually reshape the wider system. In the meantime, the tools to improve outcomes for people using adult social care already sit within every council's own governance and commissioning arrangements.Amerdeep Clarke is the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman

Title

ADULT SOCIAL CARE

Why complaints won't wait for reform

By Amerdeep Clarke | 07 October 2026

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