Since launching the service on 6 March 2023, there’s been an increase in the number of referrals that are not serious misconduct.
To reduce the number of referrals that do not involve serious misconduct, we’ve changed the:
- ‘What the allegation is about’ page
- exit page for when the allegation does not involve serious misconduct
What we changed
Changing the question page
At the moment:
- the page includes a broad definition of what serious misconduct involves and a long list of examples
- the h1 heading says ‘What the allegation is about’ which does not encourage the user to check the content on the page
So we changed:
- the h1 heading to ‘Check that your allegation involves serious misconduct’
- the examples to six short bullets
We also added content to make it clear that allegations that do not involve serious misconduct will not be investigated (‘for example, cases of incompetence’).
We did not include examples of non-serious misconduct. This is because policy says every allegation must be reviewed on a case-by-case basis, which makes defining non-serious misconduct difficult. We’ll consider adding examples in future iterations.
Changing the exit page
If the user selects ‘no’ to ‘Do you think the allegation involves serious’ misconduct, we take them to an exit page.
At the moment:
- the h1 heading says ‘You need to report this misconduct somewhere else’ which only gives the user an action and not the reason why
- the content gives the user advice on how to make a complaint - but the user has already told us that they’ve made a complaint
So we changed:
- the h1 heading to ‘Your allegation is unlikely to be investigated because it is not serious misconduct’ to clearly explain the situation
- the content to give the user some clear next steps if they’re not satisfied their complaint has been resolved
