Ms Angela Denning:

Things need to be pretty bad before a complaint comes in through the official complaints channel. It may be, as the Deputy said, that people do not know how to complain. Now, we have the information on our website, but, again, there is a need to go and find it. We are doing major work this year to try to improve our customer service offering and to figure out how we will deliver services in the future. This is one area I have asked to be included in that work. We cannot fix things if we do not know about them, and the complaint's channel is one of the ways we find out about things that are wrong.

Turning to wards of court and discharge from the wardship process, over the past year we have had more than 145 applications for discharge. The majority of those were brought by the General Solicitor for Minors and Wards of Court, who is appointed where no family member is appointed as the committee for a ward of court. There is a bit of a challenge here. The Registrar of Wards of Court will start to list cases for discharge this year. The problem is that we do not want to list a case where the ward or his or her person's family are not ready for the discharge. This would be the worst of both worlds, where the person would have no support and could be left high and dry. This is a challenge. We have recently engaged in a big push, and Mr. Ward will know more about this aspect, to try to encourage more people to apply for discharges, but there are challenges.