Summary: We shall not investigate Ms X’s complaint about the Council delaying dealing with information about her housing application. This is because the delay did not cause Ms X a significant enough injustice in practical terms for us to investigate.

The complaint

1. Ms X complained the Council delayed acting on medical information she supplied to support her housing register application and also failed to reply to her emails chasing the matter. Ms X says this prevented her bidding successfully for properties on the Council’s housing allocations system.

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The Ombudsman’s role and powers

2. We investigate complaints about ‘maladministration’ and ‘service failure’. In this statement, I have used the word ‘fault’ to refer to these. We must also consider whether any fault has had an adverse impact on the person making the complaint. I refer to this as ‘injustice’. We provide a free service but must use public money carefully. We may decide not to start or continue with an investigation if we believe the fault has not caused injustice to the person who complained, or the injustice is not significant enough to justify our involvement. (Local Government Act 1974, section 24A(6), as amended)
3. We cannot investigate late complaints unless we decide there are good reasons. Late complaints are when someone takes more than 12 months to complain to us about something a council has done. (Local Government Act 1974, sections 26B and 34D, as amended)
4. We cannot question whether a council’s decision is right or wrong simply because the complainant disagrees with it. We must consider whether there was fault in the way the decision was reached. (Local Government Act 1974, section 34(3), as amended)

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How I considered this complaint

5. I considered the information Ms X provided and copy complaint correspondence the Council supplied. I also considered the Council’s housing allocations policy. I gave Ms X the opportunity to comment on my draft decision.

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What I found

6. Ms X was on the Council’s housing register. She supplied some medical information she hoped would get her application some medical priority. Ms X says she first gave the Council the information about the relevant medical matters in 2017. She first complained to us about this matter in August 2020, so the restriction in paragraph 3 applies to events before August 2019. I consider Ms X could reasonably have complained to the Ombudsman sooner if she was unhappy with the Council’s handling of her medical information before then.
7. However, in August 2019 and February 2020 Ms X also gave the Council medical information that she says covered the same points as the earlier information. The Council accepts it delayed acting on this until after May 2020. It also accepts it did not reply to some of Ms X’s communications chasing the matter. The Council apologised for those faults.
8. Once the Council considered the medical information, it decided Ms X’s housing application should have Band 3 medical priority. I see no reason to doubt the Council reached that decision properly. Nor did Ms X’s correspondence with the Council argue the Band 3 decision was wrong; rather she argued the Council should have awarded that medical priority sooner.
9. The Council said its delay did not adversely affect Ms X’s chances of bidding successfully for housing during the delay. It gave two reasons for this argument.
10. First, the Council said the average applicant waited for this type of social housing for around eight years and Ms X had not yet waited that long. That reason was incorrect, as the Council later accepted Ms X had already been on its housing register and bidding for housing for eleven years. So I do not give weight to the Council’s argument on this point.
11. Second, the Council said that when it belatedly assessed Ms X’s medical information in 2020, it awarded her application Band 3 medical priority. However, Ms X’s housing application was already in Band 3 for another reason (overcrowding). So the Council said the decision about medical priority did not actually increase Ms X’s priority therefore its delay making that decision had not deprived her of extra priority or the chance to bid successfully sooner.
12. The Council’s housing allocations scheme says:

‘The scheme awards priority based on the highest assessed priority in each applicant’s household. We do not add together different priorities affecting a household to create multiple or cumulative preferences which move people up to higher bands.’

And:

‘This policy does not award cumulative priority. A household’s priority is assessed as the highest/most urgent preference within the household.’

13. In line with the policy, as Ms X’s application was in the same band (3) before and after the decision about medical priority, the decision about the medical evidence did not actually increase Ms X’s priority. It follows that even had the Council avoided the delay, Ms X’s priority and her likelihood of bidding successfully would not have changed.
14. I note that within a few months of the decision about medical priority, Ms X bid successfully on two properties, though she did not end up moving into either property. In the circumstances, her success is likely to have been simply because she was the bidder with highest priority. As the medical priority decision did not increase her priority, that decision was unconnected to Ms X later bidding successfully.
15. The Council’s delay and failure to reply would have caused Ms X some frustration while she awaited the decision about medical priority. I consider the Council’s apology is sufficient remedy for that.

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Final decision

16. We shall not investigate this complaint. This is because any investigation is unlikely to find that fault by the Council disadvantaged Ms X significantly enough to merit the Ombudsman devoting time and public money to an investigation.

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Investigator's decision on behalf of the Ombudsman