MORE than 100 people took their complaints against Wirral Council to the very top, a new report shows.

The Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman has released details of the complaints and inquiries made to it about every local authority in the North West in the past year.

As the apex of the local government complaints system, the Ombudsman receives thousands of complaints from people across England - after the local authority has had the chance to put the situation right.

In Wirral 116 complaints were received by the watchdog.

Thirty-seven were unable to be remedied at local level and the LGO  carried out its own detailed investigations. 24 of the complaints were upheld - a strike rate of 65%.

The majority involved adult and children's social care.

Michael King, Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman, said: “Each year we publish our annual data for councils to help with transparency and improve services for people who live and work in any council’s area.

“We are pleased to continue our good working relationship with the vast majority of authorities, and appreciate the willingness we see in implementing our remedies and learning from our investigations.

“But we believe there is so much more councils can do with the information we share every year – from these annual letters, our focus reports and public interest report.

"And I would call on councillors, senior executives and anyone with an interest in scrutinising their local authority to improve the services they provide.”

In the North West:

The Ombudsman received 12% of all complaints from the region

The highest proportion were about children and education and adult social care

The Ombudsman upheld 60% of cases it investigated in detail – that’s higher than the 57% average

The region also had the highest proportion of adult social care complaints upheld in country - 70% compared with a national average of 61%

Nationally, the Ombudsman registered 17,452 complaints and inquiries about local authorities in 2017-18, compared with 16,863 the previous year.

Significantly the proportion of complaints it has upheld has increased to 57% - up from 54% the previous year.

The Ombudsman has also issued 40% more public interest reports about local authorities in the same period.

One of the Ombudsman’s main roles is to remedy injustice and to try to put people back into the position they were in had the fault not occurred.

This year the Ombudsman made 3,622 recommendations to put things right.

This figure includes a 21% increase in recommendations to improve services on top of remedying individual injustice since 2016-17.