CEO's Introduction

This year has felt like a team effort more than ever before as we looked to support hundreds of members of the public affected by the collapse of a single firm. This led to our highest ever level of incoming complaints, well in excess of the volumes predicted in our budget.

I watched managers create bespoke processes and think creatively about our legal powers. Without this we’d have struggled to deliver the extra work within the resource planned for the year. I heard our staff comfort distressed former clients, confused about what had happened and where they stood. We visited public meetings to meet those affected in person, and staff worked to meet specific accessibility needs and helped those needing support to make a complaint. Our complaints investigators shared experience or covered other work to free up dedicated resource. We worked with stakeholders across the UK, and we challenged the providers of indemnity insurance when they sought to resist paying out compensation clients were legally entitled to.

Although new complaints relating to this have now slowed, high ongoing cases will continue to impact our work for many months to come.

Colleagues did this as we were also completing all the work in our four-year strategy which ended this year. This included finishing major projects to relocate our office (delivering a £500,000 saving over five years) and deliver a new IT platform to improve how we deliver our services. Our normal business continued to be delivered, and we have maintained performance against almost all our key measures. Every team and every person rose to these challenges, and they have my sincere thanks.

Alongside this the debate on reform has continued. We are pleased that legislation is under consideration by the Scottish Parliament. It is not the fundamental reform of the regulation and complaints model proposed by the SLCC, recommended by the Independent Review commissioned by government, and supported by consumer groups. However, it still has the potential to deliver meaningful improvements to the process, and we have been working to provide our input and experience, based on handling over 17,000 complaints, to inform the drafting.

The prospect of reform has created a year of uncertainty, but we are excited about the opportunities.

I hope the report provides something of interest for everyone, from our core performance, data on our caseload, our work to make our service accessible and to drive improvement in complaint handling across the sector.

In my closing comments I’ll look to the future, and what more we have planned to make sure we are playing a role in supporting the public and the sector.