The Renewal, Recreation and Housing Information Briefing of Bromley Council was scheduled to meet on 4 September 2025. The meeting was scheduled to consider the council's handling of complaints. The report pack for the meeting included the Annual Complaints Report and LGSCO Letter 2024/25.

Annual Complaints Report

The council was scheduled to note the Annual Complaints Report and LGSCO Letter 2024/25. The report provided statistics on the complaints that Bromley Council received, and also gave an overview of the Local Government & Social Care Ombudsman's (LG&SCO) annual review letter and data sheets for the year ending 31 March 2025.

The council is required to publish an annual report on social care complaints under the Local Authority Social Services and National Health Service Complaints (England) Regulations 2009, and the Children Act 1989 Representations Procedure (England) Regulations 2006. The council's report provides detail on its performance across all divisions.

The council aims to use feedback to improve services. Customer complaints are considered a valuable source of feedback on the performance of services.

The report included terminology used when discussing complaints:

A complaint is the whole of someone's approach to the Council expressing dissatisfaction. One or more services or teams may be referenced in that complaint, and each of those is referred to as a mention. Each complaint may identify one or more individual grievances and each of those is referred to as an aspect.

The Annual Complaints Report and LGSCO Letter 2024/25 included data on:

• Complaints received by type and division
• A five year comparison of complaints
• How complaints were received
• The proportion of complaints that were upheld
• The causes for complaint
• The timeliness of responses
• Local Government & Social Care Ombudsman cases
• Financial consequences of complaints
• Compliments

The report noted that, excluding Environment & Public Protection, the total number of complaints against the council rose by just under 14% compared to the previous year.

The most frequent cause for complaint was a lack of action (33.9%), with nearly half of those upheld. Quality of service issues (31.7%) were the next most prevalent aspect, albeit with an upheld rate less than half that of lack of action. Complaints about service delay were the most likely to be upheld at 66.7%.

Overall, 61% of all complaints were responded to within 20 working days, the first drop in performance for a number of years.

The Annual Complaints Report and LGSCO Letter 2024/25 also provided data and examples of complaints and compliments for the following departments:

• Adult Social Care
• Children's Social Care
• Housing
• Planning & Regeneration
• Education
• Chief Executive's Department
• Environment & Public Protection
• Public Health

Local Government & Social Care Ombudsman

The Local Government & Social Care Ombudsman ('the Ombudsman') acts as the final stage for complaints about local authorities, adult social care providers (including care homes and home care agencies) and some other organisations providing public services.

The number of referrals made to the Ombudsman rose by 12% from last year's 154 to 173. However, of those 173 referrals, only 43 became the subject of an investigation by the Ombudsman, a more favourable proportion (25% as against 31%) compared to last year. Of those 43 full investigations, 38 were upheld against the Council (88%). This was the first year for a number of years that the borough had a higher upheld rate than the London average.

The Ombudsman's annual review letter provides a summary of the year both for the Ombudsman and the individual Council concerned.

A review of standard wording used when inviting a complainant to return to the council if they are considering approaching the Ombudsman was underway. The updated wording will be circulated to all relevant officers and placed on the Complaints SharePoint site.

The primary area of concern for Bromley Council was the timeliness in providing responses to the Ombudsman's enquiries. More targeted work was to be undertaken with each service area to identify what measures may assist in improving performance.