Bosses claim there are no “systemic issues” despite some services seeing double the number of complaints, reports Grace Howarth, Local Democracy Reporter

Barnet Council's Colindale office — Barnet Council’s Colindale office

The number of complaints received by Barnet Council’s mental health and financial support services has almost doubled in the last year.

Barnet Council has to report annually the complaints it’s received relating to its adult social care services.

Findings showed there were 106 statutory complaints, between April 2024 and March 2025, of which 92 resulted in an outcome, 52 were not upheld, 22 were upheld and 18 partially upheld. The remaining 14 were withdrawn.

The council also received 115 compliments on its services, an increase on 2023/24, with hospitals and health receiving 19, up from 16, disabilities received ten, up from seven the previous year, and safeguarding, access and occupational therapy stayed the same with 50.

However, although the total number of complaints increased minimally year-on-year from 90 to 92, certain service areas saw double the amount of cases.

In 2023/24 mental health services received eight complaints, but this soared to 16 in 2024/25, while customer financial affairs previously received nine cases but this increased to 17 this year.

Certain services saw a decrease in numbers, such as hospitals and health, which received 24 complaints in 2023/24 and only 14 in 2024/25, while disabilities saw its number reduce from 17 to eleven.

Waiting times were also an issue, with the amount of upheld complaints in this area rising from 44.4% in 2023/24 to 61.5%.

Speaking at an adult and health overview and scrutiny sub-committee on Wednesday (5th November) Paul Kennedy, the council’s head of business performance, intelligence and systems, adults and health, said: “Although the number has increased from eight to 16 [in mental health services] compared to the previous year, the number of upheld complaints only increased from one to three so it was a small amount.

“Looking from year to year can sometimes show individuals with multiple complaints that can affect those [total] figures. This might be something we would want to keep an eye on over a longer period of time. “

Dawn Wakeling, executive director for communities, adults and health, said: “We’ve not identified any theme or trend that relates to things around the service that have changed, it’s more to do with individual’s responses to the service, there isn’t a systemic issue we’ve identified.”

Paul explained the council received complaints about the length of time to receive an assessment or the decision made about the level of care an individual has been assessed to need.

He added the council extracted learnings from each upheld complaint, which was then put into a report and discussed resulting in potential improvements to training or procedures.

Dawn said waiting times was not “the only thing” that was a “cause of complaint” and was not an “over arching” issue. She added people were assessed on the “urgency of their needs” in a “prioritisation system”.

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