Lancashire County Council (20 011 861)

Category : Children's care services > Disabled children

Decision : Closed after initial enquiries

Decision date : 19 Mar 2021

The Ombudsman's final decision:

Summary: We cannot investigate Mrs X’s complaint about the Council’s decision to take Court action. We will not investigate the events around her child’s return to a residential home as another body is investigating the same events and there is insufficient injustice to warrant our investigation.

The complaint

  1. The complainant, whom I shall call Mrs X, says the Council wrongly ended her child, Y’s, placement at a residential home and its officers had poor communication with her. She says this caused her and her family distress and affected her health.

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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’. 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 fault has not caused injustice to the person who complained, or
    • the injustice is not significant enough to justify the cost of our involvement, or
    • there is another body better placed to consider this complaint. (Local Government Act 1974, section 24A(6), as amended)
  2. 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)

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How I considered this complaint

  1. I considered the information Mrs X provided with her complaint and the Council’s replies which it provided. I considered Mrs X’s comments on a draft version of this decision.

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What I found

  1. Mrs X has a child, Y, who has complex needs. In January 2019, Y started living at a residential home, Home Z. Y spent weekends in the family home. Y became a ‘looked after child’, under section 20 Children Act 1989. This meant the Council shared responsibility for Y with Y’s parents, but with the parent’s consent.
  2. In March 2020, at the start of the COVID-19 first national restrictions, Mrs X says it was decided that Y would live for the meantime at the family home.
  3. In early May, Mrs X says she told the Council the family could no longer cope and Y needed to go back to Home Z. She says seven days later a Council officer told her that Y could not go back to Home Z as by Y moving home in March, Y had been ‘discharged’. Mrs X says she did not know this. She says her and her family have been upset and distressed since. She says Y was left in a vulnerable position.
  4. Y retuned to Home Z two days later.
  5. The Council replied to her complaint in late June. It accepted it had not explained the full implications of Y staying at the family home from March, even though Mrs X intended it to be temporary. It agreed to change the allocated social worker and the Independent Reviewing Officer appointed to Y.
  6. In August 2020, the Council issued Care Proceedings. This is an application to Court to ask it if a Care Order should be granted rather than Y live at Home Z with the parent’s consent.
  7. In December 2020, the Council told Mrs X it was closing its complaints case. It said she had agreed to its suspension because of the Court proceedings. But the Council had since learnt Mrs X had complained to Social Work England (SWE) about the officers’ professionalism and this it believed covered Mrs X’s complaint.
  8. Mrs X says as well as the ‘discharge’ complaint she also believes the Court proceedings are unnecessary and have added extra strain to the family.

Analysis

  1. We cannot investigate the Council’s decision to issue Court proceedings.
  2. Part of Mrs X’s complaint is about the professionalism of social workers. Our role is to investigate the actions of the Council as a corporate body, not to hold a single officer accountable. SWE is a more suitable body to consider those claims and we should not investigate the same issues it is covering.
  3. From Mrs X’s account Y retuned to Home Z nine days after Mrs X requested it and two days after the Council had initially refused. Whilst this clearly distressed Mrs X at a difficult time, this is not a significant enough delay to justify an investigation.

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Final decision

  1. We will not and cannot investigate this complaint. This is because we cannot investigate the Council’s decision to start Court proceedings. We will not investigate the same issues SWE is and there is not significant injustice caused by the Council’s poor communication and delay in Y returning to care to justify our investigation.

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Investigator's decision on behalf of the Ombudsman

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