Information for complaint handlers

We have created detailed guidance and an accompanying toolkit to help complaint handlers and investigators within professional standards departments deal with complaints about police officers.

The documents guide complaint handlers through the police complaints process and are designed to achieve best practice and greater consistency across all police forces.

Our statutory guidance helps police forces and local policing bodies comply with their legal obligations when handling complaints about police officers and staff. It outlines how to achieve high standards in the handling of complaints, conduct matters and death and serious injury (DSI) matters.

Our guidance sets out the principles underpinning the complaints system, when complaints should be recorded and different ways of handling complaints, including referral to the IOPC and local investigation by the police force. It also covers potential outcomes and how the outcome of a complaint can be reviewed.

This guidance applies to matters that come to the attention of police forces, local policing bodies or the IOPC on or after 1 February 2020.

Note: this guidance does not apply to other organisations under our jurisdiction which are governed by different legislation. Where appropriate, these organisations follow the spirit of the guidance when dealing with complaints.

For matters that came to the attention of local policing bodies or the IOPC before 1 February 2020, please refer to our previous statutory guidance and operational advice note.

Information about our statutory guidance prior to 2015 can be found via the National Archive. The documents dated 2012 relate to complaints and appeals received by appropriate authorities between 22 November 2012 to May 2015. The documents dated 2010 relate to complaints and appeals received by appropriate authorities between 1 April 2010 and 22 November 2012.

In November 2024 we published a package of tools to support policing to improve the handling of discrimination complaints. The package includes revised guidelines and a comprehensive toolkit for complaint handlers. 

In addition to these tools we published a detailed report which highlights how the police need to investigate discrimination allegations properly to ensure they are effectively handled first time so people can have confidence in the police complaints system.  

This guidance supports the police service to capture accurate and consistent information about complaints which can be used to identify issues and trends, This information can be used to inform development of future policy and practice at local and national levels. It applies to complaints received from 1 February 2020 - Guidance on capturing data about police complaints

This advice note helps police forces to comply with the statutory requirement to provide a report when a local investigation is open for longer than 12 months. We updated this in November 2024 to reflect some of the issues that have come to our attention where timeliness reports do not provide sufficient information. We encourage all complaint handlers to familiarise themselves with the updated version of the guidance - Operational advice note on 12 month timeliness reports

Review practitioner workshops
In October and November 2021, the Oversight team held workshops with review practitioners. The workshops mainly focused on reasonable and proportionate handling and the outcomes available to review handlers. We selected these topics from a combination of data analysis and insights from our experience of the new complaints system.

 Read our summary report and find further guidance in our Thresholds and Considerations guide and our common questions summary report.

Complaint handler workshops 
In February and March 2022, the IOPC’s Oversight team hosted online workshops for complaint handlers. We covered three topics: taking no further action on complaints, the relevant review body test and sharing effective practice. Read our summary report.

Reflective practice
In February and March 2023, the Oversight team hosted face-to-face workshops for Professional Standards Departments (PSD) and Local Policing Bodies (LPB) in England and Wales. We identified reflective practice as the theme for the workshops. This was to accompany the publication of Focus 21 which was on the subject area of reflective practice. It was recognised that reflective practice is a relatively new framework within the complaint handling process and there had been some early challenges in how effectively it had embedded within forces. Read our summary report.

This guidance provides complaint handlers with a fair and consistent approach to managing unacceptable or unreasonable behaviour by complainants. It also ensures that we give access to the police complaints system to all - Guidance on managing unacceptable and unreasonable complainant behaviour

Guidance for police and crime panels and the London Assembly Police and Crime Committee to make them aware of their responsibilities in handling complaints and conduct matters (updated November 2022)