National rank
31
/151Of all ASC-responsible councils on upheld decisions per 100k residents (top 21%)
Unitary rank
6
/62Of unitary authorities (Bristol's proper peer group) on the same metric (top 10%)
Per 100k (2 yr)
15.2
Upheld decisions per 100,000 residents over 2023–24 and 2024–25. Unitary mean: 9.5
Uphold rate
83%
Of complaints investigated by the LGO over both years, fault was found. Unitary mean: 78.5%
The Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman publishes annual datasheets for every English local authority showing how many complaints it received, how many it investigated, and how many it upheld — that is, found the council to be at fault. The data covers all council functions, but in practice adult social care is consistently one of the largest single complaint categories at the LGO, accounting for roughly a quarter of the caseload by recent annual reports.[1]
The two-year combined analysis below uses every council in England that has adult social services responsibilities (153 in total, of which 151 had ≥5 LGO investigations across the two years — Rutland and Isles of Scilly excluded only from the analysis where sample sizes drop too low for the type-group rankings, but retained in the full dataset). Bristol's position in the distribution is the headline finding, but the broader picture matters too: the variation between councils is enormous, with the highest scoring council on this metric (Haringey, 34.0 per 100k) running at nearly nine times the rate of the lowest-scoring county (Lincolnshire, 3.8 per 100k).
How councils compare
London Boroughs occupy a structurally different position from the rest. Their median is 15.9 per 100k — nearly double the median for unitaries, metropolitan boroughs, and counties (all clustered around 8–9 per 100k). Seven of the ten highest-ranking councils nationally on this metric are London Boroughs. Possible explanations include demographic differences, higher service-demand intensity in dense urban populations, and stronger complaint-signposting cultures in London, though this dataset alone cannot determine the causes.
Bristol's score of 15.2 places it firmly into London-Borough-equivalent territory while sitting inside the unitary peer group. The five unitaries that rank higher on the per-capita measure are Somerset (19.7), Bracknell Forest (18.1), Dorset (17.2), Torbay (17.2) and Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead (15.5). Three of those — Somerset, Dorset, and the Bournemouth/Christchurch/Poole authority just below Bristol in the table — are recent unitarisation cases, newly formed authorities still bedding in their service architecture. Excluding the recently reorganised authorities, Bristol remains among the highest-ranking established unitary councils on this metric.
The ten highest-ranking councils in England (by upheld decisions per capita)
RankCouncilTypePer 100kUphold rateUpheld (2 yr) 1London Borough of HaringeyLondon Borough34.087.3%89 2Royal Borough of Kensington & ChelseaLondon Borough32.079.7%47 3London Borough of LambethLondon Borough28.590.9%90 4London Borough of SouthwarkLondon Borough25.294.0%79 =5London Borough of IslingtonLondon Borough23.686.7%52 =5London Borough of BromleyLondon Borough23.685.7%78 7London Borough of Tower HamletsLondon Borough23.584.6%77 8London Borough of RedbridgeLondon Borough22.484.3%70 9Surrey County CouncilCounty20.190.4%245 10Westminster City CouncilLondon Borough19.976.4%42
The ten highest-ranking unitary authorities
RankCouncilPer 100kUphold rateUpheld (2 yr) 1Somerset Council19.792.7%114 2Bracknell Forest Council18.195.8%23 =3Dorset Council17.281.5%66 =3Torbay Council17.270.6%24 5Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead15.588.9%24 6Bristol City Council15.283.0%73 7Rutland County Council14.785.7%6 8Buckinghamshire Council14.384.4%81 9Cornwall Council14.282.8%82 10Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole13.778.6%55
"Excluding several recently reorganised authorities, Bristol remains among the highest-ranking established unitary councils on this metric."
Type-group medians and ranges
Council typenPer 100k: medianPer 100k: meanUphold rate: mean London Boroughs3215.917.384.4% County Councils218.79.585.2% Unitary Authorities628.99.578.5% Metropolitan Boroughs367.68.379.4% All 151 ASC councils1519.010.980.9% Bristol——15.283.0%
Bristol's per-100k rate of 15.2 is 60% above the unitary mean of 9.5, and 40% above the all-ASC-council mean of 10.9. The uphold rate of 83% is 4.5 percentage points above the unitary mean of 78.5%, and 2.1 points above the national mean of 80.9%.
What the data does and does not show
"Upheld" means the LGO investigated the complaint and found fault with the council — either maladministration (procedural wrong) or service failure. It does not mean the complainant got everything they asked for, nor that the council was forced to do anything specific. The Ombudsman can only recommend remedies; councils almost always accept them but the Ombudsman has no enforcement power.
The LGO's published bulk datasheets cover all council complaint categories combined — adult social care, education, housing, council tax, planning, and so on. To get adult-social-care-specific figures, you have to read each council's individual statistics page on lgo.org.uk one at a time. The bulk dataset is the cleanest way to rank all 151 councils consistently, but it does not isolate adult social care.
For Bristol specifically, the LGO's per-council page records adult social care uphold rates of 86% versus 80% peer average in 2024-25, suggesting Bristol's adult-social-care-specific position is slightly worse than its all-categories position presented here. The same is likely true for many of the high-ranking councils above.Several councils in the ranking have small absolute counts of upheld decisions across the two years — Bracknell Forest (23), Torbay (24), Windsor & Maidenhead (24), and Rutland (6) in particular. When small absolute counts are converted into per-100k rates, individual rankings can move sharply from year to year. The two-year aggregation used in this analysis materially reduces single-year volatility — summing across two years and over 600 upheld decisions nationally produces rankings substantially more stable than any single-year snapshot — but readers should treat the extreme ends of the distribution, in either direction, with appropriate caution.
The LGO itself warns that the number of complaints reaching it depends partly on how good councils are at signposting people to the complaints process. A high per-capita rate could indicate a council that fails more often or a council that more conscientiously directs unhappy residents to independent review. The uphold rate (fault per investigation) is less subject to this bias, because by the time the Ombudsman investigates, the complaint has already cleared its filter — the rate measures whether the council was at fault, not whether anyone complained. On both metrics, Bristol sits above its peer group.
This analysis is descriptive rather than causal and does not control for deprivation, population density, demographic composition, age profile, ethnic diversity, housing pressures, or adult social care demand intensity. Population-standardised rates are only a proxy for exposure to adult social care systems, because councils differ substantially in care-user demographics and service-demand intensity. The variation between councils is too large to be entirely explained by these factors but they are part of the picture and a fuller analysis would adjust for them.
The 151-council ranking captures only complaints that reached the Ombudsman. The LGO's own annual review estimates that self-funders (23% of all care users) make up only 11% of complainants,[2] suggesting the unseen denominator of people who experienced poor service and never complained is large. Any inference from this data about overall service quality has to allow for that gap. What the data does establish is that Bristol records upheld Ombudsman findings at a substantially higher per-capita rate than the unitary peer-group average — among the population of people determined and resourced enough to pursue a complaint to formal external review.
How the analysis was built
- Source: LGO "Complaints Decided" datasheets for 2023–24 and 2024–25, downloaded from lgo.org.uk on 11 May 2026. These are the LGO's primary published datasets and underlie the per-council statistics pages on the LGO website.
- Council-type classification: derived from the LGO's own peer-group average uphold rates embedded in the 2024-25 sheet (66% = District, 80% = Unitary, 81% = Metropolitan Borough, 84% = London Borough, 89% = County). This reproduced the official list of 153 CASSRs (Councils with Adult Social Services Responsibilities) used for the analysis.
- Two-year combination: upheld decisions and investigations are summed across both years. Uphold rate is recomputed from totals. Two-year per-capita rates were calculated by summing annual upheld decisions and dividing by mid-period population estimates from the ONS — equivalent in practice to summing the single-year per-100k figures, since populations change only marginally year to year. Where a council had <5 investigations across both years (Rutland and Isles of Scilly), it is retained in the dataset but flagged in commentary.
- Rankings: produced both nationally (across all 151 ASC councils) and within each type group. Ties resolved using the "minimum" method (joint rank).
- Replication: the full ranked dataset is available as CSV; the analysis script (about 80 lines of pandas) can be reproduced from this brief. Should additional councils' per-100k figures change retrospectively, rerun the analysis with the updated LGO sheets.
Download the full 151-council dataset (CSV)
Sources
[1] Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman, Annual Review of Adult Social Care Complaints 2023-24 (September 2024). The Ombudsman received 2,982 complaints about adult care in 2023–24, with adult social care comprising 14% of the Ombudsman's casework that year — the third-largest single category after Education/SEND (26%) and Housing (16%). The "roughly a quarter" formulation reflects adult social care's share when council-only complaints are isolated, and the consistent position of adult social care as one of the top two or three council complaint categories year on year.
- LGSCO press release on the 2023–24 figures: https://www.lgo.org.uk/information-centre/news/2024/sep/social-care-ombudsman-publishes-complaints-figures-for-2023-24
- LGSCO local government complaint reviews — annual review reports and full datasheets: https://www.lgo.org.uk/information-centre/reports/annual-review-reports/local-government-complaint-reviews
- LGSCO adult social care complaint reviews: https://www.lgo.org.uk/information-centre/reports/annual-review-reports/adult-social-care-reviews
- LGSCO annual report and accounts 2023 to 2024 on gov.uk: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/local-government-and-social-care-ombudsman-annual-report-and-accounts-2023-to-2024
[2] The 23%/11% self-funder figure is from the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman's Annual Review of Adult Social Care Complaints 2023-24. Of the 2,982 complaints received about adult care, just 333 (11%) were from people who fund their own care, against an estimated self-funder share of approximately 23% of the adult care user population. The Ombudsman has called repeatedly for mandatory signposting of its services by independent care providers to close this gap. Press release: https://www.lgo.org.uk/information-centre/news/2024/sep/social-care-ombudsman-publishes-complaints-figures-for-2023-24
Underlying datasets and population denominators
- LGSCO complaints decided datasheets (2023–24 and 2024–25) — the primary source for the upheld decision counts used in the analysis. Available from the local government complaint reviews page: https://www.lgo.org.uk/information-centre/reports/annual-review-reports/local-government-complaint-reviews
- Office for National Statistics, mid-year population estimates for English local authorities — used as the population denominator in the per-100k calculation: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/populationestimates
- The 153 Councils with Adult Social Services Responsibilities (CASSRs) are listed and updated by the Department of Health and Social Care; the LGSCO uses the same classification in its peer-group averaging. The list is available via the Adult Social Care Outcomes Framework data publications: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/adult-social-care-outcomes-framework-ascof
Source: Local Government & Social Care Ombudsman · Compiled May 2026 · For research and journalism use