Celebrating Annual Ombuds Day!

Happy Ombuds Day!

10 October marks Annual Ombuds Day – a celebration of ombuds services and the positive impact that they have in helping consumers resolve complaints against businesses, institutions and public services.

Ombuds Day aims to educate or remind people that there is an ombudsman to help people with a wide variety of complaints. The Ombudsman Association has published a guide to all of its members and the services that they offer. You can download a copy here.

Ombuds do more than just consider complaints and issue decisions. They highlight issues of concern developing within industries and organisations – they help businesses improve their customer service standards and direct regulators to where they ought to investigate.

Helping to Prevent Disputes

IBAS isn’t an ombudsman – we are a ‘Complaint Handler’ member of the Association –  but we act in many of the ways that an ombudsman would. IBAS is 26 years old this year and closing in on 100,000 consumer complaints that we’ve received and looked into. Some of the disputes that were most common ten years ago are relatively rare today, and we hope that our advice and feedback to the industry – sometimes contained in adverse decisions – has contributed significantly to that.

A decade ago, a major international football tournament like the World Cup or Euros wouldn’t pass without hundreds of complaints being received – most concerning misunderstandings about how different betting markets were settled.

Any high profile game going to extra time or penalties would guarantee 30 or 40 complaints from people who had bet on a team to win ‘the match’ without realising their selection needed to win in ‘normal’ time. Today these big match markets are labelled much more clearly at the point of sale and receipt. Euro 2024 generated only a few dozen complaints throughout its entire duration.

Gambling Ombudsman

We wait to see whether the new government plans to see through the recommendation of the 2023 Gambling Review, to create a Gambling Ombudsman. We have expressed our own interest in building on our experience to develop into an ombudsman and hope that in due course a Gambling Ombudsman can join the Ombudsman Association’s other members in future years’ celebrations of Ombuds Day.

World Mental Health Day

10 October is also World Mental Health Day, an initiative supported by the World Health Organization to raise awareness of mental health issues and promote the services that exist to support people struggling with their mental health. We have published another article today to remind people of the services that exist to provide support.

One of the reasons why we would like to see a Gambling Ombudsman created is to allow disputes that a gambling business has acted irresponsibly towards its customers to be heard. Currently this type of case is classified as a ‘regulatory complaint’ and referred to the UK gambling regulator, the Gambling Commission.

These complaints are said to be used to inform regulatory investigation into potentially unsafe or irresponsible behaviour by businesses, but the Commission cannot respond to each complaint individually or give any personalised feedback to the complainant.

Providing Potential Closure

That, we imagine, can’t help anyone whose mental health has suffered as a result of gambling or contributed to the problem in the first place. We accept that most people who might be vulnerable to gambling harm will have been signposted to appropriate support services by the time that they reach an ombudsman, but sometimes there can be psychological barriers to reaching out for vital help. We hope that a Gambling Ombudsman could provide – in most cases at least – a sense of closure to their complaint and potentially a platform to help the affected person move forwards.

We understand that the government is in the process of reviewing its position on these issues and we hope to read news of positive progress in the near future.