Our quarterly newsletter: July – September

In August, we were delighted to welcome our new Executive Director of Corporate Resources and Head of IT Services. Heather Beynon joins us as Executive Director of Corporate Resources, and brings with her a wealth of experience in the Welsh third sector. Before joining us, she worked as Director of Corporate Services for a housing association, and so has experience on the other side of our work! Heather is delighted to have the opportunity to use her skills and experience to contribute to improving public services.

Dewi Gaylard is our new Head of IT Services and brings extensive experience across both public and private sectors, having held senior roles in organisations such as the Development Bank of Wales, Cardiff International Airport, and others. His cross-sector experience and commitment to best practice make him a trusted advisor in the design and implementation of secure, efficient, and user-focused solutions.

We are pleased to have Heather and Dewi as part of our Senior Management team, and look forward to getting them acquainted with our work over the coming months.

As mentioned at the beginning of this newsletter, we published our Annual Report and Accounts for 2024/25 in August. We have now completed the second year of our Strategic Plan 2023-26 ‘A New Chapter’, and it has been another busy year for the office.

See some of the highlights from this report below:

Complaints about public services

We received more complaints about public services than ever before. In 2024-25, we received 3,232 new complaints about public services – up by 11%. These included complaints about:

• health (34%)

• housing (19%) – a 4% increase since 2019-20

• complaint handling (12%) – the lowest proportion of these complaints since 2019-20.

We also closed 3,165 complaints about public services – 5% more than last year.

We issued 8 Public Interest Reports during the year as well – the same number as last year.

Complaints about the Code of Conduct

Over the past financial year, we received 315 duly made Code of Conduct complaints – 4% less than last year but 36% more than in 2019-20.

Town and community council complaints remain the largest group of our Code of Conduct complaints overall, with a 7% increase in these complaints compared to last year.

The majority (56%) of the complaints that we could investigate were about the promotion of equality and respect – almost the same proportion as last year.

We investigated 49 (about 15%) of the Code of Conduct complaints that we closed this year – the same as last year. We referred 15 Code of Conduct cases to either the relevant Standards Committee or the Adjudication Panel for Wales. 85% of the suggested breaches we referred were upheld.

You can see examples of our cases in our full annual report.

Our proactive improvement work

We have continued to use our proactive powers to undertake investigations on our own initiative and to set and monitor complaints standards.

In 2024-25, we continued our important work to introduce Complaints Standards to public bodies in Wales. Following our successful roll-out to all local councils and health boards, we have turned our attention to housing associations. Currently 54 organisations across Wales operate our model complaints policy. This includes all local councils, all health boards and now most housing associations – representing about 85% of the complaints which we receive.

Our offer of free complaints handling training has remained popular and we provided a further 52 training sessions to public bodies across Wales during the year. This brings the total to 550 training sessions and 10,000 people, since 2020.

To date, we have closed 10 extended investigations. We currently have 3 extended investigations ongoing.

As we did in the case of our first own initiative investigation, we have been actively monitoring how organisations have been complying with our recommendations. We are planning to review compliance with the recommendations and any other impacts of the report this month.

So far this year, we have seen another increase in the volume of complaints about public services reaching our office.

Between April and September this year, we have received just over 1,700 new complaints about public services. This was 12% more than during the same period last year. In addition, we saw almost 3,500 enquiries – 10% more than for the same period last year.

• Health complaints constituted 30% of our new complaints so far this year. While this subject continues to account for the largest group of complaints reaching our office, we continue to see that its proportion within our caseload continues to decrease.

• 18% of our new complaints this year were about housing. Of these, 41% were about repairs and maintenance and 10% about damp and mould. This means that just over a half of all of our complaints about housing continue to relate to such issues.

• 11% of our new complaints this year were about complaint handling. This was down from 12% during 2024-25. We see this as a positive trend, hopefully indicating the impact of our complaints standards work with public service providers across Wales. Just over a half of these complaints related to health services.

So far this year, we have closed 49 investigations, more than we have over the last couple of years and we are continuing to reduce the time our investigations take to complete.  We made three investigation referrals to a Standards Committee. These are currently being considered, and we will publish a summary of these cases in due course.

We have had one hearing recently, which you can see the summary of below:

Case references 202202515 & 202208668

We received 2 complaints that a member of Welshpool Town Council had breached the Code of Conduct.

It was alleged the Member had behaved in a bullying and disrespectful manner towards others, and that publicity surrounding his suspension from the Football Association of Wales had brought his office and the Town Council into disrepute.

Our investigation found that the Member’s behaviour fell short of the standards expected and was suggestive of a breach of paragraphs 4(b), 4(c) and 6(1)(a) of the Code of Conduct. The report was referred to Powys County Council’s Standards Committee, which found the Member had failed to comply with the Code and decided that the appropriate sanction was a censure.

This decision is subject to appeal.

Our Complaints Standards Authority (CSA) team have been busy this year bringing housing associations under their Standards. Good progress is being made, with 20 housing associations currently operating under these Standards, with 5 further housing associations expected to become compliant by the end of the year.

The team will be engaging with the remaining housing associations over the coming months so that they can also be brought under the Standards.

A thematic report will accompany the CSA data publication planned for later this autumn. For the first time, the publication will include data on housing associations working under the Standards.

Keep an eye out for this report!

Last month, we published our Annual Equality Report for 2024-25.

The report outlines our work to support and promote diversity, equality and inclusion across all our functions.

The highlights of the year include:

• more impactful work to ensure that the service is accessible to all: in addition to ongoing work to improve the website and information resources, the office accepted many complaints other than in writing. There is       evidence that this service is used commonly by disabled people, although it also removes barriers for other groups. This year, 86% of complainants that took part in our survey said that it was easy to contact the office.

• strong results for awareness of and confidence in the office among the Welsh public: we regularly check the level of awareness of our office and       confidence in our service. In 2012, only 35% of people surveyed recognised our name, when asked. In 2025, the national awareness of the office stood at 48%. The same research has suggested that confidence in our office remains high. In 2025, 79% of respondents said that they had confidence in us – the highest proportion on record and 9 percentage points higher than in 2020. Positively, this assessment was higher than average for almost all potentially vulnerable groups of complainants.

• median and mean gender pay gaps: we have successfully closed these gaps.

You can read our Annual Equality Report here.

We also published our Welsh Language Standards Annual Report, which details our compliance with the Welsh Language Standards.

Our national awareness research shows that Welsh speakers are more likely than the average member of the Welsh public to know about us, as well as having confidence in our office.

This year we also saw a big increase in the proportion of our staff with Welsh language skills. Despite this, we still see that very few people use our service in Welsh. It remains a priority for us to raise awareness of our bilingual service so that Welsh speakers know they can complain to us in Welsh.

You can read our Welsh Language Standards Annual Report here.

It has been a very busy summer with our outreach activities this year! We are committed to engaging with the Welsh public wherever possible to raise awareness of our office and work.

In July, for the first time ever, we had a stand at the Royal Welsh Show. This was a great opportunity to speak to people from a different demographic than we usually engage with! Lots of people were interested in what we do as they weren’t aware of how far our powers reach, so it was really worthwhile being present at the event.

We were also present at the National Eisteddfod again this year, which took place in Wrexham. This was a big commitment both in terms of time and travel, but it was worth it! We spoke to over 200 people a day, which means that over 1,600 people are now better informed on how we can help them if they need us.

Our content about the Royal Welsh and the Eisteddfod performed very well on our social media platforms in general, so not only do these events help us reach people in-person, but digitally too.

We remain committed to delivering training sessions to constituency offices across Wales to better equip caseworkers with information on our role.

This year so far, we have delivered two training sessions to various offices. These sessions focus on an introduction to our role and powers, what we can and can’t look at in terms of complaints about public services, how to send us evidence and any communication needs around a complaint.

If you are interested in receiving free training on our role and process, please contact ffion.jones@ombudsman.wales to arrange a session.

Here is what we have planned for the coming months:

Public interest reports

We intend to publish a number of public interest reports over the next few months.

We hope that drawing attention to this line of our work will help drive improvements across the healthcare, housing and local government sectors, as these reports focus on these areas.

Yesterday we published a public interest report after finding that Hywel Dda University Health Board failed to provide ongoing specialist care for epilepsy patients with a learning disability after its dedicated service ended in June 2021. The report highlights the impact on patients with complex needs and their carers, and finds that four years later, there is still no clear pathway in place to ensure access to appropriate specialist care.

You can read the full report here.

Keep an eye out for when our other reports get launched!

Outreach events

We have three more outreach events in the pipeline this autumn:

• TPAS Conference in Llandrindod Wells

• Minority Ethnic Communities Health Fair in Cardiff

• Event at Houses of Parliament

The TPAS conference will help us target tenants, in our bid to raise awareness of how we can help with certain housing issues.

The MEC Health Fair in Cardiff will help us reach more diverse ethnic communities, which forms part of our Strategic Plan aims.

Launch of our Own Initiative Investigation consultation

We are able to undertake “Own Initiative” investigations where evidence suggests there may be systemic service failure or maladministration where no complaint has been received, or where information from individual complaints suggest that an issue may be widespread or systemic.  Our last Own Initiative Investigation, Are we caring for our carers?, was published in October 2024.

We will shortly be deciding on our next Own Initiative Investigation topic. Keep an eye out for further updates in the future!