Our Principles

​The Ombudsman’s Principles outline the approach we believe public bodies should take when delivering good administration and customer service and how to respond when things go wrong.

In particular, we want public bodies to understand how we will approach complaints, and complainants to understand how we will consider their cases.

For those reasons, we have consolidated our Principles into one publication called the ‘Ombudsman’s Principles’ which brings together the:

These three sets of Principles underpin our assessment of performance, our vision of good complaint handling and our approach to putting things right.

The Principles are based on over forty years’ experience of handling large numbers of complaints. The Principles endorse legality, flexibility, transparency, fairness and accountability – the necessary ingredients of good administration.