Complaints about the Care Inspectorate: Annual complaints performance report 2024-25
Introduction
About the Care Inspectorate
Everyone in Scotland has the right to access high-quality, safe and compassionate social care and social work services that make a real and positive difference to their lives. The Care Inspectorate is responsible for regulating care services including services for adults, early learning and childcare, children’s services, and community justice. This includes registration, inspection, complaints, enforcement and supporting quality improvement. Our role is to ensure that services meet the right standards, provide the quality of care that meets the needs of people experiencing care and support and to support them to improve if needed. We work in partnership with other scrutiny and improvement bodies, looking at how care is provided by community planning partnerships and health and social care partnerships across local authority areas. This helps all stakeholders understand how well services are working together to support positive experiences and outcomes for people.
Our job is not just to inspect care but to support improvement in the quality of care where it is needed. This means we work with care providers, offering advice and guidance and sharing good practice, to support them to develop and deliver improved care. If we find that care isn’t good enough, we take action. We identify areas for improvement and can issue requirements for change and check these are met. If we believe there is a serious and immediate risk to life, health or wellbeing, we can impose an improvement notice or apply to the Sheriff court for emergency cancellation of a service’s registration.
We support people to raise concerns, and we handle complaints made to us about registered care services. We robustly challenge poor-quality care and we are independent, impartial and fair. We have a duty to protect people and will refer adult and child protection concerns to the relevant social work agencies or Police Scotland. We influence social care policy and development both nationally and internationally, sharing our learning with others, contributing to the transformation of social care in Scotland.
Complaints about the Care Inspectorate
The policy and procedure for complaints about the Care Inspectorate reflect our commitment to valuing complaints as a source information to improve how we work. Our policy and procedure are based on the Scottish Public Services Ombudsman’s (SPSO) Model Complaints Handling Procedure (MCHP).
We monitor and report on our performance managing complaints about the Care Inspectorate in line with the requirements set by the SPSO. The consistent application and reporting of performance against the SPSO key performance indicators (KPIs) helps us to understand and report on our performance in line with the Model Complaints Handling Procedure (MCHP). We also use this information to compare; contrast and benchmark complaints handling with other organisations to share learning and improve standards of complaints handling performance.
This report relates to complaints about the work of the Care Inspectorate. Complaints about care services are managed and reported separately.
Our reporting model is based directly on the requirements of the Scottish Public Services Ombudsman (SPSO) model complaints handling procedure (MCHP) and their complaints key performance indicators (KPIs). Under this framework we and other public bodies are expected to report against the following KPIs:
SPSO KPI 1
The total number of complaints received.SPSO KPI 2
The number and percentage of complaints at each stage that were closed in full within the set timescales of five and 20 working days.SPSO KPI 3
The average time in working days for a full response to complaints at each stage.SPSO KPI 4
The outcome of complaints at each stage.
This year’s Complaints Annual Performance Report presents information about the way we have managed complaints about the Care Inspectorate between 1 April 2024 and 31 March 2025.