The Legal Ombudsman has said it will need its highest ever budget of £20m next year to cope with the surging complaints about lawyers.
In its business plan and budget for 2025/26, the Office for Legal Complaints forecasts that the number of new complaints coming in during the year will edge past 10,000.
Growing demand may reflect greater awareness among consumers of their right to complain, but the ombudsman’s data suggests that standards of service and complaint handling have not improved for several years, and in some cases have got worse.
The ombudsman insists it has overseen a ‘step change’ in its annual output, increasing the number of complaints resolved annually from 6,500 to more than 8,000 this year. Almost half of the cases now coming into the service are resolved in less than 90 days.
But incoming complaints and increasing faster than the ombudsman can handle, prompting the proposed budget increase of 11.4% – more than £2m. The increase had already been trailed last year when the organisation consulted on its budget, but the proposed increase is even higher than had then been expected.
Introducing the business plan, OLC chair Elisabeth Davies and chief ombudsman Paul McFadden said the service’s operating model is ‘fundamentally sustainable’ but cannot meet the levels of demand being projected.
‘The overall position is not acceptable: people using legal services need to be able to rely on providers to deliver consistently high standards,’ they said. ‘The challenge for LeO is that, at current resourcing levels, it cannot reduce the number of people waiting for an in-depth investigation at the pace required to make meaningful improvements to the experience of these consumers.
‘The higher demand effectively absorbs the increased output that would otherwise reduce the time customers have to wait.’
They added that persistently high demand was a clear indicator that consumers are being ‘let down’. LeO finds evidence of poor first-tier complaints handling in 46% of cases it investigates overall – with persistent issues in the quality and tone of providers’ responses.
The proposed budget will allow for a 38% increase in investigator resources and bring about a 33% reduction in waiting times. In addition, the ombudsman wants to drive higher standards and transparency by sharing more insight from the complaints that are resolved.
The backlog of cases yet to be allocated to investigators is currently at 3,362: this figure is almost identical to that reported last July. LeO’s business plan states that additional resourcing would result in a 17% greater reduction (497 cases) in the volume of unallocated investigations in 2025/26, with further improvements across 2026/27 and 2027/28 as the full effect of established investigators takes effect.
If the budget is approved by the Legal Services Board, it will have increased by almost £5m in just three years. The average cost per case will have increased from £1,618 in 2022/23 to £2,239 next year.
In last year’s consultation, the service had proposed that the level of its case fee should rise from £400 to £800. It also suggested a tiered fee structure where the fee would increase based on the number of upheld complaints a service provider had during the year. The £800 fee proposal will be put on the back-burner pending further consultation, as well as a potential tiered approach and a proposal for a ‘polluter pays’ principle.
