Summary: The complainant, a foster carer, complained that the Council made numerous mistakes when paying her fostering allowances and expenses. The Council has accepted fault and agreed to the recommended way to remedy the injustice caused to the complainant. It is also looking to improve its payment system for all foster carers. We are therefore closing the complaint.

The complaint

1. The complainant, who I refer to as Mrs X, is an emergency and short-term foster carer, which means that she has a number of placements. She complained that the Council’s foster care payment system was such that she constantly experienced errors in payments/allowances to her, ranging from delayed payments, wrong allowances, missed payments, payments based on incorrect information and mathematical errors.
2. Mrs X is also concerned that the deficiencies in the fostering service’s finance department will have, on the balance of probability, affected other foster carers.
3. The injustice is that Mrs X has spent unnecessary time emailing the Council to correct errors and she says that it is she who notices these errors rather than the Council. Mrs X considers she wastes valuable time, which she could spend looking after vulnerable children in her care.

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The Ombudsman’s role and powers

4. We investigate complaints of injustice caused by ‘maladministration’ and ‘service failure’. I have used the word ‘fault’ to refer to these. We cannot question whether a council’s decision is right or wrong simply because the complainant disagrees with it. We must consider whether there was fault in the way the decision was reached. (Local Government Act 1974, section 34(3), as amended)
5. 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

6. I have divided Mrs X’s complaint into two. The first aspect concerns the complainant’s own individual payments which she says have had to be corrected by her, and the second aspect being the wider issue to do with possible deficiencies in the financial arrangements for foster carers’ payments.
7. I have investigated the period of August 2020 to August 2021 in respect of Mrs X’s first complaint. I asked the Council to consider Mrs X’s complaint about systemic failures in the foster payment system.
8. I have spoken to Mrs X on the telephone and made enquiries of the Council.
9. I issued a draft decision statement to Mrs X and the Council. I have taken into account their additional comments before reaching my final decision.

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What I found

Legal background

10. Children who are looked after by a council may be placed in foster care. Carers are paid a fostering allowance when looking after children and the amount they receive will depend on, among other things, the number of children placed with them and the age of the child(ren).
11. Emergency foster carers normally take children on a short-term basis. 

The Council’s procedures

12. The Council tells me that:

“children’s services pay a nightly tier fee to the carers plus an age-related child’s allowance for the time they are with the respite carers care. This means that each respite period is different length and for different age children, and therefore the amount paid to foster carers for this task varies between different placements.

The Council has an expenses system in place which involves the foster carer completing an expenses form, which is checked by their supervising social worker, is then authorised by the foster team manager and is then sent to a finance inbox by email. Finance officers then raise a ‘purchase order’ on the system. If the claim is over £500 then approval will be needed from the budget manager. Once the payment is uploaded and approved if needed, it then goes on the next pay run.

There are two pay runs per week, on a Tuesday and a Thursday each week. This is a manual process and therefore human error and administrative errors have occurred”

Events of this complaint

13. The Council tells me that Mrs X is right when she says that about 75% of her payments had to be corrected. The Council explains that Mrs X takes the most emergency/respite looked after children in the borough and therefore has more allowance and expenses claims than most. The Council apologises for these errors.
14. The Council says that there are two payment cycles per week which gives time for a claim to be paid within the two week timescale, once it is received by the finance department. The Council accepts that delays do occur if the claim forms lack all the necessary information.
15. In August 2021, the Council introduced a system whereby the mathematical additions for foster carers’ expenses can be seen by them before they submit a claim. The Council says that this system should be used by all foster carers by the end of this year and should save time correcting expenses’ errors.
16. Within the financial year April 2020 to April 2021, and since April 2021, the Council has not received any complaints from other carers.

The Council’s planned improvements to the payment system

17. The Council says that it does not consider there is a systemic failure in its foster payment system. But it is planning to improve the payment system.
18. The Council says that:

“In November 2019, internal auditors within the Council completed a review of the overarching foster carer finance process with some recommendations/ refinements which were addressed. The one recommendation was that there was not sufficient declaration on the forms of who had checked and agreed the claim. Following this, the expense form was updated to include a signature box of the foster carer, the supervising social worker and approving manager.

The Council has worked together with foster carers to make refinements to the fostering expenses process in recent months, such as creating one ‘fostering expenses’ inbox which is shared between 4 managers who take it in turns every 4 weeks to manage and clear the expenses inbox at the end of every working day. This has meant that the responsibility is not falling to one manager to sign off and send on all expenses for all carers”.

19. In addition, the Council is digitalising as many parts of the system as possible to reduce the kind of problems which Mrs X has experienced. It is also looking to see if there is a less manual and more automatic system that could be used.
20. The Council hopes to have a foster carer portal by 2023, whereby foster carers’ can store their allowances and expenses claims and directly view their progress.

Analysis

21. The Council has accepted that Mrs X has experienced delays and errors in the payments to her which would have caused avoidable distress and frustration. As the Council has accepted these errors, I have not looked at the sequence of events in detail. It is to the Council’s credit that it has acknowledged payment difficulties for Mrs X.
22. The Council says that Mrs X is the only one who has formally complained. That does not mean other foster carers have not had similar problems. Indeed, Mrs X says that they have and she is aware of this because she is part of a fostering network and says that many other foster carers complain about and are affected by the Council’s system failure.
23. While I do not dispute Mrs X’s comments, I could not say that there is sufficient evidence of a service failure which warrants further investigation by the Ombudsman. Moreover, I am satisfied that the Council is aiming to improve the foster carer payment system, and this should be of benefit to all foster carers.

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Agreed action

24. We take the individual circumstances of each complainant into account when recommending remedies. For injustice such as avoidable distress, the complainant usually cannot be put back in the position they would have been in but for the faults identified. Therefore, we usually recommend a symbolic payment to recognise the impact of the fault on the complainant.
25. Distress can include uncertainty about how the outcome might have been different but for the faults and can include lost opportunity.
26. Where there has been avoidable distress, our recommendation to remedy such injustice are normally between £300 to £1,000 depending on the severity of the injustice, the vulnerability of those affected and whether the injustice is over a prolonged period.
27. Mrs X will have been caused avoidable frustration by having to correct mistakes in the payments to her over a twelve month period. The Council has apologised to her via this investigation. But to support the apology, the Council has agreed, within six weeks of the date of the final statement, to apologise to Mrs X by letter, and to make a symbolic payment of £500 for her avoidable frustration.

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Final decision

28. I am satisfied that the Council has recognised its fault, is taking action to improve the payment system and is willing to apologise and make a symbolic payment to recognise the avoidable distress caused to Mrs X. Therefore, I am closing the complaint.

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Investigator's decision on behalf of the Ombudsman