A rights-based approach to complaints

Adult care services provide a key role in protecting and promoting human rights, by ensuring that individuals are supported to live with dignity, autonomy, and participate in their family lives, communities, faiths, and cultures. When things go wrong with services, it can have a significant impact on someone’s rights.

Rights-based issues will sometimes be an explicit part of a complaint, with individuals talking about their human rights being ‘breached’ by a local council or service. More commonly though, rights-based issues will be an implicit part of complaints, expressed around principles of fairness, respect, equality, dignity, and autonomy (the FREDA principles).

Complaint handlers are not expected to have technical knowledge of human rights law, and a complaints process cannot establish whether there has been a ‘breach’ of someone’s human rights. However, it is good practice for councils to take a rights-based approach to complaints handling, especially in a service that is closely linked to human rights protection.

Our good practice guide for complaint handlers contains further information about how to apply the FREDA principles to individual complaints.