This week the Office for Legal Complaints (OLC) published its latest Annual Report and Accounts, which looks back on LeO’s performance in the year to 31 March 2023.
Those who’ve followed LeO’s journey will know it’s been a challenging few years by all accounts. The need for us to change and improve has been both clear and urgent.
Today, we can say we have delivered the step change we needed to. Across the year we resolved more than 9,400 complaints – a 44% year-on-year increase, following a similar increase the previous year.
In well over half of these cases, the parties benefited from an early resolution approach – a result of our fundamentally rethinking and rebalancing our service to ensure we give people the answer they need at the right time.
We’ve also seen a sustained reduction in the number of people waiting to access our service – as well as in the overall time taken to resolve complaints, with early resolution resulting in substantially shorter journey times.
As our outlook has improved, it goes without saying that we’ve welcomed the improved – albeit cautious – confidence expressed by those with an interest in a high-performing LeO.
At the same time, we don’t take that confidence for granted; there’s no doubt that, despite our progress this year, everyone at LeO would like to be even further along our improvement trajectory. In the short term, our priority is ensuring the step change we’ve made is genuinely sustainable.
But we also need to look to what’s next. A core feature of the OLC’s next strategy – which will take LeO from 2024 to 2027 – is a commitment to sharing more of our insight and experience, re-establishing LeO as a constructive, independent voice for improvement in the legal sector. This is a key part not only of an Ombudsman’s role, but also of proportionality and demand-management, ensuring we receive only complaints that genuinely need our input.
We’re focused on staying the course – and look forward to further conversations in the coming months to shape the LeO of the future.
