The last few years have seen a period of significant review of the way complaints about public services in Scotland are handled. As a result, the Scottish Government and the Scottish Parliament have agreed a broad programme of change to help drive improvements in public service complaints handling. This will add new roles and responsibilities to the Scottish Public Services Ombudsman (SPSO) as well as impacting on how each public service in Scotland responds to complaints.
The purpose of this website is to provide information on these changes and explain how we got here. Updates on the progress of implementation will be added regularly.
The website is also being prepared to become a resource to advise, support and inspire complaints handling by public services in Scotland. Over the coming months and years, our intention is that this resource grows into the definitive source of best practice in complaint handling.
The first steps in developing our new role is our consultation on complaints handling principles and model complaints handling procedure guidance. Information on this is provided below and we hope you will contribute to this consultation to help shape the future of public sector complaints handling in Scotland.