Manchester City Council (20 002 998)
Category : Children's care services > Child protection
Decision : Closed after initial enquiries
Decision date : 06 Oct 2020
The Ombudsman's final decision:
Summary: The Ombudsman will not investigate Mr X’s complaint that the Council prevented his contact with his child. The Council is not the direct cause of this.
The complaint
- The complainant, whom I shall call Mr X, says the Council prevented him from seeing his child Y.
The Ombudsman’s role and powers
- 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:
- it is unlikely we would find fault, or
- the fault has not caused injustice to the person who complained, or
- we cannot achieve the outcome someone wants. (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 to him which it provided. I considered Mr X’s comments on a draft version of this decision which included during a telephone conversation.
What I found
- Mr X says that in July 2020 he asked the Council to risk assess him and supervise his contact with his child, Y. The Council refused. It said his contact with Y was a private matter between him and Y’s mother. Mr X says the Council has given Y’s mother inaccurate information about him and has threatened to remove her children from her care without good reasons.
- The Council has no power to force or control the contact between Mr X and Y. Only a Court or any one with parental responsibility can do this. The Council’s decision not to risk assess or help with contact is not the sole direct cause of his lack of contact with Y.
Final decision
- The Ombudsman will not investigate this complaint. This is because his claimed injustice, not seeing his child, is not the sole direct result of the Council’s actions.
Investigator's decision on behalf of the Ombudsman