Summary: We will not investigate this complaint that the Council has failed to act to safeguard the complainant’s children and has failed to have regard to his parental rights. Investigation would not achieve anything significant or lead to a different outcome and is not therefore warranted.

The complaint

1. The complainant, Mr X, complains that the Council has failed to act to safeguard his children and has failed to have regard to his parental rights.

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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 investigation would not lead to a different outcome, or there is no worthwhile outcome achievable by our investigation.

(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 provided by the complainant and the Council.
4. I considered the Ombudsman’s Assessment Code.

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My assessment

5. Mr X’s children are in the Council’s care and are placed with foster carers. His complaint concerns their welfare and his own parental rights. He says the Council failed to act on his concerns about his children’s mother’s new partner and declined to remove him or the children out of the area.
6. He further complains that the Council’s officer misled him into believing he could have care of his children but has not allowed him to do so. He has also raised concerns about the care his children are receiving in care and the denial of his parental rights.
7. The Ombudsman will not investigate Mr X’s complaint because investigation would not lead to a different outcome. The children are no longer living with their mother, and her partner has no agreed access to them. In any case, the Council does not have the authority to control where he lives, as Mr X wants. So, there is nothing further that investigation would be able to achieve regarding the period before the children came into the Council’s care.
8. We can make no comment on whether Mr X was misled into believing he would be able to have the care of his children. Decisions on the children’s care are ultimately for the courts. The evidence does not indicate that the Council has any concerns about the children’s welfare in the foster placement and, if Mr X disagrees, his recourse is to ask the court to make different care arrangements. It is also the case that, if he feels his parental rights are not being respected, he may go to court to enforce them. There is no role for the Ombudsman.

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Final decision

9. We will not investigate Mr X’s complaint because our intervention would not achieve anything significant, or lead to a different outcome.

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Investigator's decision on behalf of the Ombudsman