Adult social care complaints went up by almost a quarter this year. The number the ombudsman actually upheld went down.
That gap is the interesting part. Not the headline rise, which any provider under pressure could probably have guessed at, but the fact that more people are complaining while a smaller share of those complaints turn out to be justified. Something is happening earlier in the process, before a case ever reaches a formal investigation. And it isn't really about the standard of care at all.
The Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman logged 3,938 adult social care complaints in the year to April, up from 3,231 the year before. Investigations fell slightly, from 987 to 904, partly because more cases were wrongly directed or sat outside the ombudsman's remit. Of the complaints it did investigate, the uphold rate slipped from 79% to 77%.
Safeguarding complaints jumped 62% year on year. Assessment and care planning complaints rose 25%.
Big moves, both of them, for one year.
Amerdeep Clarke, the ombudsman, made a point in the report that stuck with us more than any of the numbers did. Organisations that handle complaints well, in his account, are the ones that own a mistake quickly, apologise like they mean it, and act to stop it happening again.
They also make sure the person knows where to go if they're still unhappy. Nothing on that list is about the quality of care itself. It's about what happens in the first conversation after something has gone wrong.
Why do complaints keep rising when care itself isn't getting worse?
Because the first response is doing most of the damage. A complaint that gets acknowledged fast, explained honestly, and followed up properly tends to stay a complaint. But one that gets deflected, or minimised, or handled by whoever happened to be on shift that afternoon, has a habit of escalating into a formal ombudsman case, whether or not the underlying issue was serious.
The 99.8% compliance rate with the ombudsman's recommendations is telling. It says providers are perfectly capable of fixing things once they're forced to. But the real gap sits earlier than that, well before any formal case gets opened.
We've placed enough registered managers and operations directors over the years to know roughly where that first response actually lives. It isn't in a policy document. It's whoever picks up the phone, or reads the safeguarding alert, and decides in the moment whether to be defensive or straight with the family on the other end.
Small decision. Big consequences.
What does good complaint handling actually look like?
Less dramatic than you'd expect, mostly. A registered manager we've worked with in the Midlands, who runs three services for a mid-sized group, says her whole approach boils down to one habit. She calls the family herself within 24 hours, even when the complaint is minor, even when she hasn't got all the facts yet.
Not to defend the service. Just to say she's looked into it and will come back with more. Families almost never escalate after that first call, in her experience, whatever the eventual outcome turns out to be.
It's a leadership instinct rather than a training module.
You can teach someone the CQC framework in an afternoon, more or less. Teaching them to pick up the phone before they've built a defence is a lot harder, and it isn't something a job description is built to capture.
A service manager we spoke to a few months back put it more bluntly. Most of the registered managers she'd worked under, she said, treated a complaint like a threat to be contained rather than a conversation to be had. And once a manager starts thinking that way, the whole team underneath them tends to follow.
What should employers actually be looking for?
Not more qualifications, for a start. Most registered managers already clear the Level 5 bar and know the regulatory framework cold. What's much harder to judge from a CV is how someone behaves in the ten minutes after they realise something has gone wrong.
Do they reach for the phone first, or the policy folder? Would they tell you the bad news themselves, or wait for it to surface some other way? Neither of those is something a CQC fit-and-proper-person interview is built to probe. And most internal promotion processes don't test for it either.
This tends to be roughly where a generalist hiring process falls short, and it's worth being blunt about why. Most registered manager interview questions for employers focus on regulatory knowledge and staffing structure. They miss the one thing that actually predicts whether your next complaint stays a conversation or turns into a case file.
You need someone in the room who's watched enough of these situations play out to know which answer to a scenario question is rehearsed and which one is real.
Which is really the case for using a specialist rather than running the process yourself, or handing it to a generalist agency that treats care management like any other vacancy. It isn't about the volume of candidates on offer. It's about knowing which two or three questions actually separate a manager who'll own a mistake from one who'll quietly bury it.
Operations directors and area managers matter here too. They set the tone for how complaints get handled across a whole portfolio, long before any individual case reaches them.
But if your last few complaints took longer to close than they should have, or escalated further than the underlying issue warranted, that's usually worth a closer look at the leadership layer rather than the frontline.
Our health and social care recruitment team spends a fair amount of its time on exactly this kind of screening, well beyond the CQC checklist. And if you're weighing up whether to run your next registered manager or operations director search in-house, our guide to choosing a social care recruitment agency is a reasonable place to start before you commit either way.
None of this makes the ombudsman's numbers wrong, or the underlying complaints any less serious. They aren't. A 22% rise says less about care standards slipping than it does about how many services still don't have someone senior enough, or confident enough, to pick up the phone on day one.
That's a hiring problem before it's anything else. Which, unlike most of what's in this report, happens to be a fixable one.
