You have to tell people that they have the right to complain to us, that there's a time limit for doing so, and how to contact us.  This is outlined in section 22* of the  Scottish Public Services Ombudsman Act.  When you write to someone at the end of your complaints process you must explain this.  The model complaints handling procedures for each sector outline the information you are required to use - these can be accessed on our Valuing Complaints website.

[*Section 22 (2) (a) says that you should make information about SPSO, including our contact details, generally available in the information you publish about your complaints process.  As the SPSO is the final stage in that process, we normally expect people to complete your complaints process before coming to us.]

At the end of our investigation we will tell you our decision. We will also send the decision to the organisation you complained about and we are likely to publish information about it. We do this in order to share learning from the complaint, to help public services improve. We publish our decisions in two types of report.

Public decision report

This is a summary of a decision letter. We send these reports to the Parliament and Scottish Ministers and publish them on our website and sometimes in other forms of communication like newsletters. We usually publish decision reports about six weeks after making our decision. In a small number of cases we do not publish decision reports, usually to prevent the possibility of someone being identified. For the same reason we sometimes we publish the report, and anonymise the organisation complained about (for example, we call the organisation A Council).

If you have requested a review of your decision, we will not publish the decision report until the review is complete.

Public detailed investigation report

This is a detailed report, usually where a case has a wider public interest. We send these reports to the Parliament and Scottish Ministers and publish them on our website and in other forms of communication like newsletters. We publish these reports at the same time as giving them to the people involved in the complaint. 

Every month we publish reports of our investigations.

We publish detailed sectoral complaints reports, an annual report and statistics.  We also publish annual letters to councils, health boards, water authorities, the Scottish Prison Service and the Scottish Housing Regulator.

There may be information about your organisation in any or all of our publications.

When we publish our detailed investigation and decision reports, we normally identify the organisation involved. Where, however, we think that doing so could identify an individual, for example, in a small GP practice or in a complaint about school bullying, we are likely to anonymise the organisation. We also reserve the right to exempt some reports from publication, usually to prevent the possibility of someone being identified.

You can search our published investigation reports and decision reports here.

Please contact our communications team on 0131 240 8849 if you can't find what you're looking for.

You must make arrangements for an investigation report to be publicly available for at least three weeks (unless the Ombudsman directs otherwise).  This is to allow any person to inspect it at any reasonable time, and to obtain a copy of it, or any part of it.  You must also publicise those arrangements.  In practice, this can simply mean publishing the report on your website and letting people know it is there.  It is, however, for you to decide how to publish these and you may use other relevant methods should you choose to do so.

Section 15(4) of the Scottish Public Services Ombudsman Act 2002 sets out this requirement.

Our Valuing Complaints website has information that can help you with this.

Visit Valuing Complaints and find out about our direct courses and e-learning.