The police complaint reviews nobody adds up, by force, 2024/25

Last updated 2026-09-12 · Published by PoliceComplaint.com

The police complaints watchdog counts how many people ask for a review of a rejected complaint, and it adds the two review routes together to do it. When it counts how many of those reviews found the force wrong, it splits the same reviews into four separate measures and never adds them up. Add them up, and in 2024/25 24.5% of completed reviews found the force's own handling was not reasonable and proportionate: 1,484 of 6,046.

The number exists in four pieces

A review of a rejected complaint is carried out either by a local policing body, which in most areas means the Police and Crime Commissioner's office, or by the IOPC itself. Each of those splits again, depending on whether the original complaint was investigated or handled some other way. That makes four routes, and the IOPC reports the outcome of each one separately:

• LPB reviews, complaint investigated
• LPB reviews, complaint handled otherwise
• IOPC reviews, complaint investigated
• IOPC reviews, complaint handled otherwise

In the annual statistics the first two sit in Table 25 and the second two in Table 27. In the quarterly bulletins they are four separate measures. In neither place is there a combined figure, and the combined national rate of 24.5% appears nowhere in the IOPC's own 2024/25 report.

The IOPC does the hard part, then stops one step short

This is not a case of data the IOPC does not hold. It publishes a separate bulletin for every force, benchmarking that force against a group of most similar forces and against the national figure. In Devon and Cornwall's bulletin for the same period, all four numbers sit on a single page: 11 IOPC investigation reviews of which 3 were upheld, 1 LPB investigation review upheld, 46 IOPC non-investigation reviews with 16 upheld, and 114 LPB non-investigation reviews with 49 upheld.

Those four add to 172 reviews and 69 upheld, which is the 40.1% at the top of the table below. The bulletin never adds them. The four are charted and benchmarked as four, the force's own total is not printed anywhere in it, and no table puts the forces side by side.

It is a choice, not a limitation

The IOPC's published list of bulletin measures includes "Number of LPB and IOPC reviews received", which adds the two routes together. It has no equivalent measure for outcomes. So the two routes are combined when the question is how many reviews arrived, and kept apart when the question is how many found the force wrong.

The reforms that created this system were, in the IOPC's words, "designed to achieve a simpler, more proportionate, and customer-focused complaints system focused on learning and improvement". A complainant wanting to know how often their force's decisions get overturned currently has to do the arithmetic themselves.

Added up: every force with 50 or more completed reviews, 2024/25

Among these 37 forces the rate runs from 6.9% at Leicestershire Police to 40.1% at Devon & Cornwall Police. That is a spread of about 5.8 to one, and the median force is at 21.3%. Metropolitan Police Service completed the most reviews of any force, 971, and sits at 36.0%.

Which route your review takes is not your choice

Since 1 February 2020 the old right of appeal to the force itself was replaced by a right of review, and in most cases that review goes to the local policing body rather than to the force that made the original decision. British Transport Police came under the same legislation from 4 January 2021. Whether a review goes to the LPB or to the IOPC depends on how the complaint was handled, not on what the complainant would prefer, which is another reason the two routes are more useful together than apart.

Forces excluded, and why

The IOPC advises caution when reading these percentages "due to the sometimes small number of reviews involved", and that caution is why these 7 forces are left out of the ranking: each completed fewer than 50 reviews in 2024/25. Their figures are shown here so the exclusion is visible rather than silent.

What this measures, and what it does not

It also does not tell you how often complaints succeed. Only a small minority of complaints reach a review at all, so the denominator here is reviews completed, not complaints made. The question this answers is narrower: when someone was unhappy enough to ask for a review, how often did the independent stage disagree with the force?

Two forces can differ because they handle complaints differently, because their complainants differ, or because their local policing body reviews differently. The figure does not distinguish between those.

If your complaint was rejected

You can apply for a review, and the letter rejecting your complaint should tell you which body to apply to and by when. How reviews work is set out here, and every force's figures are in the full table.