Foreword
We are pleased to share with you this special edition of our newsletter, which includes highlights of our Annual Report 2025-26.
This year’s results are the clearest signal yet that pressure on public services continues to be felt by people across Wales. We are now receiving three times as many complaints as the office did 20 years ago, and this year’s increase is the sharpest we have seen.
Behind every number is someone who has felt let down and is looking for answers, fairness and improvement. The volume of complaints is a challenge, but it is also an opportunity: every upheld complaint, every early resolution and every recommendation can help prevent the same injustice happening again.
In May this year we published our new Strategic Plan 2026-29. In it, we respond to the rising demand for our service but also acknowledge other key opportunities and challenges such as the need to improve access for under-represented groups, and the importance of using data, digital tools and innovative technology to strengthen impact. We close this newsletter with details of our new Business Plan which explains what new approaches we intend to explore and what impacts we want to achieve.
We are looking forward to the work ahead.
We have reported the busiest year in the office’s 20-year history, with a record rise in complaints about public services and councillor conduct across Wales.
We received 4,507 duly made complaints across our public services and Code of Conduct remits – 27% more than last year, 47% more than three years ago, and three times as many as 20 years ago.
For the first time, we received more than 4,000 complaints about public services in a single year, reaching 4,183 – a 29% increase on 2024-25 and 50% higher than three years ago. Health was the most complained about subject, but large proportions of our casework continued to relate to housing and complaint handling.
Despite the high volume of cases being received, we closed a record number of complaints, and we intervened in 568, putting things right for people experiencing problems with public services. Despite the significant increase in closures of public service complaints, we continued to resolve these complaints in a timely fashion, with investigations into public services taking on average 10.8 months – well within the target of 12 months.
Complaints about Welsh health boards rose by 42% to 1,351. By far, the most common area of these complaints is clinical treatment in hospital, and we have seen the proportion of these complaints increasing between 2023-24 and 2025-26.
Complaints about housing associations rose by 25% to 513. We continue to see increases in complaints about repairs and maintenance and damp and mould.
Complaints about local authorities rose by 27% to 1,704. Over the last three years, we have seen a consistent increase in the numbers of complaints across a range of subjects – from housing and social services to environment and environmental health, planning and education.
In 2025-26, we received 324 duly made Code of Conduct complaints – 3% more than last year and 14% more than 3 years ago.
Town and community council complaints remain the largest group of our Code of Conduct complaints overall, but we saw the proportion of these complaints decrease slightly to 58% (from 60% last year).
We investigated 85 (about 24%) of Code of Conduct complaints that we closed this year – a significant increase on last year. Despite this increase, we also made significant progress in reducing our investigation time and resolving a number of aged cases.
We referred 15 Code of Conduct cases to either the relevant Standards Committee or the Adjudication Panel for Wales.
Our office also continued to develop our improvement work across Wales.
By the end of March 2026, all local authorities, health boards and 21 housing associations were operating under our model complaints policy. We are delighted to report that as of 23 September all housing associations are now compliant with the model policy.
To date, we closed 20 own initiative investigations – where we can look into an issue without having received a complaint. At March 2026, we were conducting a further 4 investigations, considering:
- potential health care failings
- how social landlords deal with complaints about disrepair and damp and mould.
We also promoted widely 9 public interest reports published during the year, which highlighted serious failings in healthcare and social housing services.
In addition, despite the increase in casework, we have continued to promote the service to those most likely to need it and improve accessibility.
Awareness of the office is now at its highest level, with 52% of the Welsh public aware of us.
During the year, we received 236 complaints over the phone, a key service designed to remove barriers for people who are less comfortable to complain in writing.
We have now published our Business Plan for 2026-27, setting out the practical steps we will take over the coming year to improve access to our service, strengthen our impact and ensure we are ready to meet growing demand.
Key priorities include improving the timeliness of our casework, piloting a new online platform to help people track their complaints, expanding our complaints standards work into primary health care, making it easier for people to complain orally, and increasing our use of own initiative investigations to address issues affecting communities across Wales.
The Plan also focuses on outreach to under-represented groups and engagement with Members of the Senedd and third sector organisations, while continuing to invest in our people, digital services and organisational resilience. Together, these actions will help us maximise our positive impact for people and public services across Wales.