Summary: We will not investigate Mr X’s complaint about the Council’s charges for commissioned respite care for him and his wife Mrs X, and the information it gave about its charging. There is not enough evidence of fault by the Council to warrant an investigation.

The complaint

1. Mr X is Mrs X’s husband and main carer. Mrs X has been financially assessed as contributing a maximum of £170 per week for any Council-commissioned care she receives. Mr and Mrs X sought at-home care provision for a respite break for 16 days in 2024. The Council commissioned a care firm to provide Mrs X’s care. Mr X complains the Council:
1. charged Mrs X £147 for two days of care when the other two full weeks were charged at £170 per week;
2. failed to explain that if Mrs X took less than a full week of care which costs less than her £170 contribution amount that she would pay the full cost for those care days.

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The Ombudsman’s role and powers

2. We investigate complaints about ‘maladministration’ and ‘service failure’, which we call ‘fault’. We must also consider whether any fault has had an adverse impact on the person making the complaint, which we call ‘injustice’. We provide a free service but must use public money carefully. We do not start or continue an investigation if we decide there is not enough evidence of fault to justify investigating. (Local Government Act 1974, section 24A(6), as amended, section 34(B))

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How I considered this complaint

3. I considered information from Mr X and the Ombudsman’s Assessment Code.

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My assessment

4. The Council’s care charging process uses a ‘charging week’ which starts on a Monday. Service users’ care charges are worked out on a weekly basis, Mondays through to Sundays.
5. Mrs X is charged for care up to the maximum amount of her weekly care contribution, which has been separately assessed as £170 per week. This means if the care she receives over however many days within any charging week costs less than £170, she would pay that lower amount instead. In this case, Mrs X received two days of care in the third respite charging week, which totalled £147, so that is the amount charged for her care that week.
6. Mrs X has not been overcharged for the care she received for the third weekly charging period because the amount is below her assessed weekly contribution of £170. The Council has applied its process to calculate the charge for Mrs X’s care in the third part-week of her respite provision. It is not fault for the Council to adopt a weekly charging process to calculate its service users’ charges. There is not enough evidence of fault in the Council’s process here, nor in how officers have applied it, to justify us investigating.
7. We recognise Mr X says he did not know how the third partial week of care would be charged. Had he known, he says he might have booked more days in the third week for a small extra cost, to make it up to £170. We understand this caused Mr X some annoyance. But it is not for the Council to give service users advice on which days they should book. Mr X booked and received the care for Mrs X on the dates he chose and needed. He could have asked the Council how it calculated the charges before booking if he was not clear how much the cost would be for each week, or part of a week, that his booking involved.

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Final decision

8. We will not investigate Mr X’s complaint because there is not enough evidence of Council fault to warrant us investigating.

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Investigator's decision on behalf of the Ombudsman