Share this
by Emma Laxton on December 9, 2025
The year 2025 stands as a watershed moment for public sector complaint handling in the United Kingdom. It is a year defined by the convergence of record-breaking operational demand, a hardened statutory landscape, and the rapid, often turbulent, integration of artificial intelligence into the machinery of redress. For professionals within the industry—from frontline caseworkers in local authorities to governance directors in central government departments—the "complaints function" has evolved from a back-office administrative necessity into a strategic imperative that directly influences regulatory grading, financial stability, and public trust.
This report offers a comprehensive analysis of the current landscape. Drawing on data from the 2024-25 reporting year, it reveals a sector under profound strain but also one engaged in rigorous transformation. The Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman (LGSCO) has reported a second consecutive year of double-digit percentage growth in complaint volumes, exceeding 20,000 cases for the first time in its history. Simultaneously, the Housing Ombudsman Service (HOS) has seen determination volumes surge by 30% following the introduction of the statutory Complaint Handling Code, exposing a maladministration rate of 71% across the social housing sector.
Yet, amidst these rising tides of dissatisfaction, there are signals of resilience and recovery. The Institute of Customer Service’s UK Customer Satisfaction Index (UKCSI) for July 2025 indicates a modest rebound in satisfaction with local public services, suggesting that digital transformation efforts are beginning to bear fruit in transactional areas, even as complex dispute resolution remains challenged. Furthermore, the deployment of specialised case management technology, exemplified by the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman’s own use of Workpro systems to drive efficiency, demonstrates that the gap between capacity and demand can be bridged through intelligent process design.
This report dissects these trends across four key aspects: the surging volume and complexity of disputes; the impact of the new statutory compliance regime; the role of technology and AI in modern casework; and the human factors of workforce resilience and culture. It concludes that we have entered the era of "High-Stakes Redress," where the cost of failure is measured not just in compensation, but in severe regulatory intervention and reputational damage.
The Strategic Context: Volume, Velocity, and Visibility
In 2025, the overarching narrative of the public sector complaints industry is one of permanent escalation. The historical assumption that complaint volumes would stabilise following the post-pandemic corrections of 2021-23 has been definitively disproven. Instead, the sector is managing a "new normal" characterised by higher citizen awareness, lower barriers to entry for lodging grievances, and a complex web of systemic service pressures that generate failure demand.
The "New Normal" in Complaint Volumes
The operational reality for 2025 is that the volume of complaints entering the public sector system has reached an all-time high. This is not an accidental fluctuation but the result of deliberate policy interventions designed to empower citizens, combined with the degradation of frontline service capacity in specific areas such as housing repairs and special educational needs (SEND).
The LGSCO’s data is particularly illustrative of the scale of the challenge with 20,773 complaints and enquiries in 2024/25, up 16% on the previous year. Exceeding 20,000 complaints represents a psychological and operational threshold for the sector. It signifies that the local government complaints system is processing a volume of disputes equivalent to the population of a small town every year. This increase is driven by a "vulnerability multiplier": the areas seeing the steepest rise are those involving the most vulnerable citizens—children requiring statutory support and families in precarious housing.
The Housing Ombudsman’s 30% increase in determinations is equally significant. It reflects the clearing of historic backlogs but also the aggressive stance of the Ombudsman in "calling in" complaints and the impact of the statutory Complaint Handling Code, which has removed the "democratic filter" and streamlined the escalation path for tenants. The increase in repairs complaints investigated - up 43% - indicates that the physical deterioration of social housing stock is generating a wave of casework that administrative teams are struggling to stem.
The Statutory Shift and Regulatory Convergence
A defining feature of the 2025 landscape is the entrenchment of statutory complaint handling codes. The era of "guidance" and "best practice" has been superseded by a regime of "statutory obligation" and "compliance failure orders."
The Housing Ombudsman’s Complaint Handling Code, which became fully statutory on 1 April 2024, has fundamentally altered the risk profile of complaint handling. Landlords are now under a legal duty to comply with the Code’s provisions regarding accessibility, timescales, and governance. The Ombudsman’s power to issue Complaint Handling Failure Orders (CHFOs) has been exercised vigorously, with the 2024-25 report noting that the number of CHFOs issued remained consistent with the previous year despite the higher volume of complaints.This suggests that while volume has risen, the rate of procedural failure has not improved significantly, pointing to a persistent "implementation gap" in the sector.
Furthermore, 2025 has seen a marked trend toward regulatory convergence. The LGSCO and the Housing Ombudsman have aligned their codes to create a unified set of expectations for local authorities. This alignment is critical for "mixed-tenure" complaints where a citizen’s grievance might span both landlord functions (HOS remit) and statutory duties like homelessness or social care (LGSCO remit). For a local authority, this means there is no longer a place to hide; the standard for handling a complaint about a leaky roof is now legally tethered to the standard for handling a complaint about a missed care assessment.
The Satisfaction Paradox
A critical insight from the 2025 data is the divergence between general customer satisfaction and complaint handling performance.
The Institute of Customer Service’s UK Customer Satisfaction Index (UKCSI) for July 2025 reports that customer satisfaction in the Public Services (Local) sector has improved by 2.4 points to a score of 72.7. This recovery, bringing satisfaction scores back towards pre-crisis levels, reflects successful investments in digital service delivery for transactional interactions. Citizens renewing permits, paying council tax, or accessing library services are benefitting from smoother, "right first time" digital experiences.
However, this improvement in the "happy path" masks a deterioration in the "unhappy path." The UKCSI data explicitly highlights that complaint handling remains the lowest-scoring dimension across the entire index, with a score of just 59.8 out of 100. This near 13-point gap between general satisfaction and complaint handling satisfaction reveals a systemic weakness: public bodies are getting better at processing standard transactions but are struggling significantly when a process fails and requires human intervention to resolve a dispute.
This paradox explains why Ombudsman volumes are soaring even as satisfaction indices tick upward. When a citizen’s interaction falls off the automated rail, the safety net of the complaints process is often frayed, leading to entrenched disputes that escalate to the regulator. The finding that 26% of customers needed to use more than one channel to achieve their objective exacerbates this, creating friction and confusion that breeds further complaints
Sector Analysis: The Frontlines of Dispute
To understand the landscape of the industry in 2025, you need to look beyond the aggregate statistics and examine the specific operational realities within the distinct sectors of public service. Each sector faces unique pressures, yet all are united by the common thread of rising expectations and resource constraints.
Social Housing
The social housing sector remains the crucible of complaint handling reform in 2025. The long shadow of the Grenfell Tower tragedy and the death of Awaab Ishak continues to drive a relentless focus on property condition and the "voice of the resident."
Maladministration as a Systemic Indicator
The Housing Ombudsman’s finding of an overall 71% uphold rate for 2024-25 is a stark indicator of sector health. In a functioning complaint system, the internal two-stage process should resolve the vast majority of valid grievances, leaving only the most complex or borderline cases for the Ombudsman. A 71% uphold rate implies that landlords are routinely failing to identify and rectify their own errors, effectively outsourcing quality assurance to the regulator.
More alarmingly, the Ombudsman identified 120 landlords with a maladministration rate of over 75%. For these organisations, the complaints process is not a mechanism for redress but a bureaucratic hurdle that delays justice. The Ombudsman’s intervention has been to shift from individual case determination to systemic investigation, using the weight of data to force improvement in these underperforming landlords.
The "Big 6" and the Human Cost of Disrepair
In 2025, the Housing Ombudsman published a series of "Learning from Severe Maladministration" reports that provide harrowing insights into the human consequences of administrative failure. One report focused on the "Big 6" building safety compliance areas (asbestos, fire, water, gas, electrics, and lifts), while another highlighted failures in window repairs.
These reports reveal a recurring theme: the disconnect between data and reality. In many severe maladministration cases, the landlord possessed the necessary information—a repair logged in a CRM, a surveyor’s report recommending action—but failed to act due to siloed systems or poor contractor management.
- Window Repairs: The Ombudsman cited cases where children’s bedroom windows were boarded up for four years, or where residents were forced to use duct tape to hold frames together. These are not merely service failures; they are failures of asset management and safeguarding.
- Damp and Mould: Despite the regulatory focus, damp and mould remain primary drivers of complaints. The Ombudsman noted a specific failure to "connect the circumstances of the household to the condition of the property". This failure to integrate person-centric data (e.g., a child with asthma) with property-centric data (e.g., a reported leak) is a key technological and procedural gap that the industry is racing to close in 2025.
Local Government
If housing is the crisis of the built environment, Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) is the crisis of the social sector. In 2024-25, the LGSCO’s caseload was dominated by the collapse in timely provision for children with additional needs.
Volume and Complexity in Children’s Services
The LGSCO received a record number of complaints, with Education and Children’s Services being the primary driver of upheld cases in many authorities. In Buckinghamshire, for instance, 56% of all upheld cases related to this area. In Devon, SEND complaints were noted as having the "highest complexity," imposing a disproportionate burden on administrative staff.
These complaints are characterised by "systemic delay." The failure to issue Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCPs) within statutory timescales is endemic, driven by a national shortage of educational psychologists and specialist school places. For complaint handlers, these cases are operationally difficult because there is often no "fix" available within the control of the complaint team—the service failure is a result of a resource deficit, yet the complaint must be upheld, and a remedy paid.
Housing Overtaking Social Care
A significant shift in the 2024-25 LGSCO data is that housing complaints have overtaken adult social care complaints in volume. As councils struggle to discharge their homelessness duties, they are generating complaints about the suitability of temporary accommodation (e.g., families placed in B&Bs for extended periods) and out-of-area placements.
However, while housing volumes are higher, the severity of adult social care complaints remains acute. The LGSCO’s review found that issues of assessment and care planning still constitute more than half of social care complaints. This suggests that while housing is a volume challenge, social care remains a high-risk area where poor complaint handling can mask significant safeguarding issues.
Health and Social Care
The National Health Service (NHS) continues to navigate a complex complaint environment where patient frustration regarding access often boils over into aggression, complicating the task of empathetic redress.
Clinical Care and the PHSO
The Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman (PHSO) received 5,392 complaints in 2024-25. While volumes have remained relatively stable compared to the explosive growth in local government, the nature of these complaints—focusing on clinical care, diagnosis errors, and treatment delays—means they are resource-intensive to investigate. The appointment of a new Ombudsman in June 2025 signals a renewed focus on using these complaints to identify "underlying systemic challenges" rather than just resolving individual grievances.
Staff Safety as a Complaint Constraint
An often-overlooked factor in the state of the industry is the environment in which complaint handlers operate. The 2024 NHS Staff Survey revealed that 14.38% of staff experienced physical violence from patients or the public, and nearly 9% experienced unwanted sexual behaviour.
This hostile environment has a direct impact on complaint handling culture. When staff are subject to abuse, the natural psychological response is defensiveness. This makes it incredibly difficult to embed the "Complaint Standards" which encourage a welcoming and open approach to feedback. The industry is therefore facing a "compassion fatigue" crisis, where the workforce charged with resolving complaints is itself traumatised by the users of the service.
Central Government
Central government departments, operating at a massive scale, face challenges of processing efficiency and systemic error rates.
DWP and the Independent Case Examiner (ICE)
The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), administering benefits for 23 million people, is the largest transactional engine in the UK public sector. The Independent Case Examiner (ICE) report for 2024-25 highlights significant operational improvements. The average time to resolve a complaint was reduced by 1.55 weeks to 3.07 weeks, and investigation times were cut by 3.49 weeks.
This efficiency gain is a testament to improved case management processes. However, the root cause of complaints remains the accuracy of the underlying benefit system. The National Audit Office (NAO) qualified the DWP’s accounts due to £9.31 billion in overpayments. When a system generates overpayments of this magnitude, it inevitably triggers a downstream avalanche of complaints regarding debt recovery and financial hardship. The DWP’s complaint landscape is thus structurally tethered to its error rate.
The Home Office and Redress
The Independent Examiner of Complaints (IEC) for the Home Office reported receiving 5,392 complaints The IEC secured £124,781 in financial redress for complainants. Complaints typically relate to "maladministration"—lost files, delayed visas, and poor communication—rather than the substance of immigration decisions. The high number of "live cases" (849) at the end of the year indicates that despite redress efforts, the backlog remains a persistent operational challenge.
In part 2 we will explore the use of technology and AI in complaints handling, along with the compliance challenge and the reality of working in a complaints role.
