Every major institution in the UK advertises a complaint system. The NHS has PALS, the police have Professional Standards, the DWP has internal reviews, universities have panels, banks have “resolution teams.” On paper, these systems suggest fairness and accountability. In reality, they are designed for gatekeeping, delay, and dismissal.
Complaints in the UK rarely lead to resolution. Instead, they follow the same cycle: redirection to a website, generic responses quoting policy, endless repetition of your story to different staff, and finally silence. The system decides which complaints are “worth” investigating, and whose voices matter.
I say “the UK” because I have gone through every level. I have complained to managers, escalated to senior managers, and even written to ministers, commissioners, and parliamentary inboxes about health, social care, and the DWP. And still nothing. If even ministers do not respond, what chance does an ordinary claimant, patient, or student have?
In my own cases, I have evidence in writing: emails, letters, internal notes. Yet this evidence is treated as irrelevant. For example:
Ambulance services: I experienced degrading treatment during a call-out, where my needs as a disabled person were minimised and dismissed. I documented the incident in detail, but no action was taken.
The NHS: staff pointed me towards PALS while I was an inpatient, praising it as the solution to everything. But once discharged, PALS became another locked door, producing only excuses.
Banks: after I was given wrong advice that cost me money, I was told they “could not find” the phone call in question. Only when I threatened the Financial Ombudsman did they suddenly locate the evidence and refund me. It took months.
The police: when I complained about racism, the conclusion was the same as so many others have heard: our colleague was right, you were wrong.
And I am not the only one. In support groups, across disability networks, and among claimants and patients, I hear the same story repeated: people complain, they gather evidence, they follow procedure and the system still denies them justice. Complaint systems work consistently, but only in one direction: to protect institutions.
Racism, Ableism, Classism — Built Into the System
This failure is not neutral. Racism, ableism, and classism shape who gets dismissed and who gets heard.
When a Black person complains about racist policing, their account is disregarded in favour of officers’ words.
When a disabled person complains about inaccessible or degrading treatment, it is reframed as “miscommunication.”
When claimants or working-class people challenge the DWP, they are treated as irritants rather than citizens with rights.
The gatekeeping function of complaint systems is not about fairness. It is about preserving institutional hierarchies and ensuring that the most marginalised remain unheard.
The Rot of Hierarchism
At the core of this problem is hierarchism the culture of protecting staff and reputations over accountability. A racist remark is excused. A cruel dismissal of a disabled patient is written off as “not what they meant.” A harmful decision is defended to preserve the image of competence.
But shielding staff prevents learning. It ensures that failures are never corrected and are instead passed on to the next recruit. This is how rot takes hold inside institutions.
The Metropolitan Police shows where this leads. For decades, complaints of racism, misogyny, and corruption were ignored. Instead of reform, the institution shielded itself. Today, the Met is in crisis precisely because it failed to deal with complaints. What was dismissed as “a few bad apples” was, in fact, a system that refused to learn.
When complaint systems fail in this way, they do more than frustrate. They inflict violence. Not always physical, but institutional: the violence of dismissal, the violence of disbelief, the violence of silencing. Each unanswered complaint tells marginalised communities that their pain will not be recognised, their evidence will not matter, and their experiences will be erased unless they launch petitions, mount campaigns, or go to court.
That is not accountability. It is systemic violence disguised as procedure.
Every mishandled complaint erodes trust. Patients stop trusting the NHS. Citizens stop trusting the police. Claimants stop trusting the DWP. Communities retreat, alienated. Public faith in justice collapses.
If complaint systems worked as intended, they could be engines of reform. They could expose failures, shape better training, and create cultures of accountability. Instead, they preserve the façade of fairness while ensuring nothing changes.
What Needs to Change
The UK cannot continue to treat complaints as threats to reputation. Complaints are evidence lived, documented, painful evidence of what has gone wrong. They are the material of learning. To bury them is to bury truth.
Until institutions face complaints honestly, the rot will continue. Staff will remain untrained. Injustice will be reproduced. And the same communities disabled, racialised, working-class will pay the price.
The UK claims to have complaint systems. What it has, in truth, are gatekeeping systems. And until that changes, people like me and countless others will continue to document our truth elsewhere, because at least here, on our own terms, our voices cannot be erased.