London Borough of Haringey (19 004 368)

Category : Children's care services > Disabled children

Decision : Upheld

Decision date : 27 Nov 2019

The Ombudsman's final decision:

Summary: Mrs X complains about the Council’s attempts to arrange a review of her son’s short breaks personal budget. The Ombudsman found fault in the way the Council wrote to Mrs X. The letters it sent were not clear enough and caused her confusion and frustration. One letter arrived several days after the date of the meeting it proposed. The Ombudsman recommended the Council should apologise to Mrs X and pay a financial remedy in recognition of the injustice caused to her. It agreed to do so.

The complaint

  1. Mrs X complains the Council’s attempts to arrange a review of her son’s short breaks personal budget were poorly communicated and organised. She says letters were unclear and a home visit was handled without any sensitivity. Then, when she complained, a manager telephoned her and during the conversation implied she was involved in fraudulent behaviour. Mrs X says the Council’s actions have caused her great offence and distress.

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The Ombudsman’s role and powers

  1. 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’. If there has been fault which has caused an injustice, we may suggest a remedy. (Local Government Act 1974, sections 26(1) and 26A(1), as amended)
  2. If we are satisfied with a council’s actions or proposed actions, we can complete our investigation and issue a decision statement. (Local Government Act 1974, section 30(1B) and 34H(i), as amended)

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How I considered this complaint

  1. I spoke with Mrs X and read her complaint to the Ombudsman. I wrote to the Council to make enquiries and reviewed the information it sent in response
  2. Under the information sharing agreement between the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman and the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills (Ofsted), we will share this decision with Ofsted.
  3. I shared a copy of my draft decision with Mrs X and the Council and I invited them to comment on it.

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What I found

  1. Mrs X’s son has autism. He receives a personal budget from the Council which Mrs X uses to arrange for short breaks for him. The Council says its policy on these short break budgets is to review them yearly, “to see if your child’s or your family’s needs have changed.” It also highlights the budget agreement between it and Mrs X says it will carry out annual reviews “to ensure that the support remains appropriate.” Mrs X says it had not carried out a review for several years before this occasion.
  2. The Council says it intended to review Mrs X’s son’s budget because he was in a transition year. It felt this justified a face-to-face meeting rather than a paper-based review. The Council also says a review the previous year was ‘not successful’ due to objections from Mrs X. Mrs X denies that, though says she complained in 2015 about the Council’s approach.
  3. Mrs X received a letter in November 2018. It said it related to short break reviews and was from a Reviewing Officer in the Council’s Disabled Children’s Team. The letter said, “We are now in a position to review your child’s care package (respite services). We anticipate that we shall be reviewing the care 7th December 2018 at 4pm”.
  4. Mrs X says although the letter did not say where the meeting would take place, similar meetings in the past were at the Council’s offices. She assumed this would be the same, but when she called the number on the letter on the day, the person she spoke with told her the Reviewing Officer was already on the way to her house. Mrs X says she had already arranged work commitments that day to be close to the Council’s office and so could not make the meeting at home.
  5. The Council has already accepted the letter did not contain enough information. It says because of Mrs X’s complaint about it, it now uses a specific template which provides clearer information about the purpose and venue of these meetings.
  6. Mrs X says the next contact from the Council was an unannounced home visit later in December. She complains the Reviewing Officer turned up at her house while she was sleeping, owing to the effect of her own disability. Her husband told her someone was there to see her, but Mrs X says although she asked him to tell her she was resting, the Reviewing Officer insisted on seeing her. Mrs X was unhappy about this but went downstairs and asked the Reviewing Officer to leave. Mrs X says she was upset by the Reviewing Officer’s approach and comments.
  7. Mrs X’s husband provided his own account to the Ombudsman. He said the Reviewing Officer pushed her way into the house despite him saying Mrs X was unwell. He remembers Mrs X was unhappy with the intrusion.
  8. The Council says it sent a letter to Mrs X proposing the home visit. Its account is Mrs X’s husband opened the front door to the Reviewing Officer and invited her in. He said Mrs X was at work. It says he was in the process of taking a message to pass on when Mrs X came into the room.
  9. Mrs X says she eventually received the letter nine days after the date on it. She believes its arrival was delayed because the Council used second class postage at the busiest time of year for the postal system. She says the post mark showed the letter was only sent with two days’ notice and is unhappy it told her if she did not comply, “the personal budget will be stopped.”
  10. Mrs X complained to the Council about what happened. As a result, the Reviewing Officer’s manager wrote to her. She accepted the letters were “not clear” and “quite bluntly written” and said they would be rewritten more sensitively. She also provided reasons the review needed to take place and presented the Council’s version of events. Mrs X was unhappy with this response and asked to escalate her complaint.
  11. After a further email exchange, Mrs X says she received a telephone call from the manager. She says during this call the manager accused her of misusing her son’s personal budget and failed to resolve her other issues. Mrs X says this had never been the case and the insinuation deeply offended her. Mrs X goes as far as to suggest the comment may have been motivated by racism, although accepted in conversation with the Ombudsman this cannot be proven.
  12. In a complaint response to Mrs X, the Council denied the manager accused her of misusing the funds allocated to her son. It said the manager asked Mrs X if she was “worried about what you spent the direct payment on”, to try to understand if that was why the review meeting had not yet taken place. It says this led to a difficult conversation with Mrs X “that got out of hand”.
  13. In its letter to the Ombudsman, the Council added some context to the manager’s comments. It says there was “confusion about the spend on the account in the past which caused some distress to” Mrs X.
  14. Both Mrs X and the Council agree it later completed the review without the need for a face-to-face meeting.

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Analysis

  1. The Council has an entitlement to carry out reviews of personal budget accounts. However, the approach taken to any review must meet the standards of good administration and the expectations it sets out in its agreements with clients. In this case, the principle of reviewing the short break personal budgets annually is in the Council’s policy and the client agreement.
  2. I consider fault affected both attempts the Council made to meet with Mrs X. Both letters sent to her contained errors and left out important information. The second letter warned the personal budget could be stopped, but without acknowledging the reasons why a second meeting had had to be arranged. The second letter was also posted at short notice and only arrived several days after what, to Mrs X, was an unannounced visit.
  3. I am satisfied the fault identified caused Mrs X a significant personal injustice. She was clearly left frustrated by the Council’s inability to organise the meeting it said it wanted. She was also put to the time and trouble of having to complain to the Council to get it to acknowledge the letters were unsatisfactory and to try to progress the review.
  4. I would add however, although Mrs X was understandably not sure where the meeting on 7 December was taking place, she could have contacted the Reviewing Officer sooner than the day itself to clarify this.
  5. Ultimately, the Council has introduced a template letter that now ensures the Reviewing Officer will provide all the necessary information at the first attempt. It also gives a much better explanation of why it needs to carry out the review visit and what will happen during the meeting.
  6. Although I have found the arrangements for the visit by the Reviewing Officer were fault, I am not satisfied there is enough evidence on balance to find what happened during the visit was also fault. There is a clear difference in the accounts given by both parties. Mrs X and her husband say the Reviewing Officer essentially barged into her home and made demands to see her. The Council says the Reviewing Officer was invited in and understood Mrs X to be at work when she appeared without warning. While I have no reason not to believe Mrs X and her husband’s recollections of what happened, the same applies to the Reviewing Officer’s account. Without any independent evidence I am unable to find fault. Despite my conclusion, the Council should carefully consider the perception of the Reviewing Officer’s visit held by Mrs X and her husband.
  7. I have also considered the other part of Mrs X’s complaint, about the telephone call with the Reviewing Officer’s manager. I asked the Council if it had a recording of the call but it said it did not as it was made from the manager’s work mobile phone. It provided a note of the telephone call written by the manager, but this added little to the account of the telephone call the Council had already provided in its complaint response to Mrs X.
  8. Ultimately, this is an incident once again where the only evidence is one word against another. It is impossible for me to know what was really said in the telephone call without being able to listen to it. I cannot uphold Mrs X’s complaint she was accused of fraud, which would be fault in the circumstances, in the absence of any supporting evidence that it happened.
  9. I also considered whether the manager was right to even approach the issue of whether Mrs X had concerns about the way the personal budget had been spent. However, in the context of the past issues it outlined the decision to raise it was a matter of the manager’s professional judgment. Although I understand why Mrs X feels the manager taking that approach was offensive, her opinion does not in itself mean it was fault.

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Agreed action

  1. The Council has already agreed with and carried out the Ombudsman’s recommendation to:
    • write to Mrs X to formally apologise for the content of the letters sent to her in November and December 2018, and the frustration caused by them.
    • pay Mrs X £150 in recognition of the effect this had on her.
  2. By 27 December 2019, Council has agreed to formally remind all staff of the need to allow extra time when sending letters near Christmas, especially when organising meetings at short notice. Where possible, they should be encouraged to explore alternative arrangements such as making a telephone call or sending an email, as well as sending a letter.
  3. The Council should write to the Ombudsman to confirm when it has completed this action.

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Final decision

  1. There was fault in the Council’s attempts to arrange a review meeting with Mrs X for her son’s personal budget. This caused her an injustice which the Council has agreed to remedy.

Investigator’s final decision on behalf of the Ombudsman

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Investigator's decision on behalf of the Ombudsman

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