Leicestershire County Council (19 014 427)
Category : Children's care services > Child protection
Decision : Closed after initial enquiries
Decision date : 29 Jan 2020
The Ombudsman's final decision:
Summary: The Ombudsman will not investigate Mr X’s complaint about the Council wrongly naming his child. It is unlikely we would achieve a significantly different outcome than the apology given.
The complaint
- The complainant, whom I shall call Mr X, says the Council referred to his child by the wrong name.
The Ombudsman’s role and powers
- We cannot investigate a complaint about the start of court action or what happened in court. (Local Government Act 1974, Schedule 5/5A, paragraph 1/3, as amended)
- 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 injustice is not significant enough to justify the cost of our involvement, or
- it is unlikely we could add to any previous investigation by the Council. (Local Government Act 1974, section 24A(6), as amended)
How I considered this complaint
- I considered the information Mr X provided with his complaint and the Council’s replies which it provided. I considered Mr X’s comments on a draft version of this decision.
What I found
- Mr X says that on two occasions the Council’s children services team referred to his child by the wrong name. The Council say it did so in a report for Court and the other time in a complaint reply. It apologised.
- We cannot investigate the content of a report provided to a Court.
- It is unlikely our investigation would achieve more than an apology for wrongly naming a child in a complaint. The injustice and fault alleged is not significant enough to justify an investigation.
Final decision
- The Ombudsman will not and cannot investigate this complaint. This is because we cannot investigate court reports and it is unlikely we would achieve a significantly different outcome.
Investigator's decision on behalf of the Ombudsman