Mr. Peter Tyndall:

It is a difficult one. We see a particular snapshot of public services where people are not happy. Where we see systemic issues, as we did with the PUP where we suddenly got a lot of complaints about something that did not exist previously, we nominated somebody to lead on that. Ms Hanrahan was very active in that process. We engaged very proactively with the Department.

We had a clear picture of what was going on there because we were getting such a volume of complaints about it that we could see we needed to deal with them, if one likes, as a piece, rather than as one-off isolated incidents. That worked well. We see it from time to time. For instance, we know we will get a range of complaints at a particular time of year in respect of university grants, SUSI and so on. We encounter patches of complaints. There are occasions when we see enough of particular systemic issues to enable us to form a broad picture of a sector or a particular issue within a sector. We are currently examining several complaints relating to nursing homes. The number of such complaints is up significantly in the current year. Complaints dropped in 2020 but that is certainly not the case in 2021. Complaints are running at record levels; the highest we have ever seen.