Assistant Director of Strategy and Partnerships
In our 2022 to 2025 corporate strategy, we have committed to finding out what stops people from complaining. This is so we can explore how to work with communities to remove those barriers and raise awareness of our service.
Targeted and sensitive engagement with communities will help us understand the issues they face, and how we can support them to raise concerns where that rarely happens.
As the final stage for unresolved complaints about the NHS and UK central Government departments, we know we need to look at the whole picture. This means looking at what stops people from complaining to the local organisation they are unhappy with, and what stops people from coming to us if their complaint is not resolved.
Our research findings
We worked with YouGov to begin this journey. Its research has helped us understand which communities and groups may be greatly affected by failings in public services but rarely (if ever) complain.
YouGov carried out extensive interviews, focus groups, desk research and online surveys, making it one of the most wide-reaching research projects we have ever conducted. The results were fascinating, but understandably raised more questions.
The findings told us that younger people aged 18 to 29 were less likely to complain, alongside people who did not have a disability or long-term health condition and people who did not have children. This may seem straightforward, but the picture is complex. Economic, cultural, and demographic factors all play a significant part in awareness of complaining and who is more likely to complain – locally and to the Ombudsman.
Our research combined several factors to help identify specific groups that may benefit from targeted awareness-raising:
- younger people from ethnic minority backgrounds
- younger people with disabilities or long-term health conditions
- people from Chinese or other Asian ethnic backgrounds
- people from lower-income households with three or more children.
We are getting more data to identify where these groups may be concentrated across England. This will help us plan a programme of local engagement events in 2023 to 2024. It will identify destinations for our regional Ombudsman roadshow events where we visit local communities.
Working with communities to establish trust
The research gave interesting results on potential barriers. Most people said they did not complain because they feel nothing will change as a result, they were afraid it would affect their access to future services, or they thought it would be too emotionally draining to ‘fight the system’.
These are emotional and cultural factors, rather than simple process issues that are easier to address. Crucially, they point to an overarching lack of trust.
To explore these themes further, we met with many people across the voluntary and community sector. We also spoke to international and regional Ombuds colleagues about their experiences of carrying out outreach in under-served communities.
This feedback added an extra dimension to our research. We heard that many under-served communities have a very low level of trust: not only of the system that provides public services, but of organisations like ours, which are often seen as part of the same system.
With that in mind, community leaders and Ombuds colleagues told us that engaging directly with under-served communities is the least effective approach. We will first need to build trust.
Next steps
To do that, we have identified several activities to take forward in 2023 to 2024:
- We will pilot an outreach programme focused on partnering with community leaders and specialist groups to facilitate engagement.
- We will work with community leaders and organisations who serve groups identified in our research. Together, we will set up a network of volunteers who can support their communities in navigating complaints and tell us about issues affecting their community.
- We will run joint events with community groups and work with charities and volunteer groups to raise our profile in local communities.
- We will carry out research into areas of concern raised by communities we have already spoken to.
These actions, alongside our Ombudsman roadshow events, are just the start. We will develop opportunities for our staff to get involved in outreach activities, so they can experience and gain insight into issues affecting local communities. And we will set up national and international communities of practice with organisations involved in outreach work, so we can exchange best practice, learn and continuously develop our approach.
Download the research report by YouGov.
