Summary: We will not investigate the Council’s decision to assign an officer to Ms X’s family of a gender she does not prefer. We will not investigate how the Council provided information to a Tribunal.

The complaint

1. The complainant, whom I shall call Ms X, complains about the gender of the social worker the Council assigned to her family.

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The Ombudsman’s role and powers

2. 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)
3. 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. (Local Government Act 1974, section 24A(6), as amended)

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How I considered this complaint

4. I considered the information the Council provided with her complaint. I considered Ms X’s comments on a draft version of this decision.

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What I found

5. Ms X says the Council’s children services team assigned her family a social worker of a different gender to the child they were to support. She says the Council had upheld her complaint in 2020 that a different gender social worker should not be appointed to her family.
6. Ms X says her child is non verbal and has a lack of understanding about suitable behaviour. She says the social worker’s gender has increased her anxiety. She says it has caused problems in a Tribunal case.
7. The previous complaint, to which Ms X refers, concluded on assigning a different gender:

As noted by the IO ‘there are no direct practice issues in regard to male social workers being allocated to work with female children with disabilities’, however, we appreciate that you have found the allocation of a male worker to your daughter’s case difficult. This issue will be put on the agenda of the whole service Team mangers meeting as a practice discussion point. Any learning from this discussion can then be cascaded to the Social Work teams to help inform best practice.

8. The Council did not promise to not assign a male social worker again.

Analysis

9. It is unlikely we would find fault in the Council assigning a social worker whom Ms X objects to because of their gender. The Council is entitled to make sure professional judgements on which of its officers it should assign to each case.
10. We will not investigate which officers a Council chooses to assign to provide evidence or information for a Tribunal. It is reasonable for Ms X to have told the Tribunal if the officer’s gender meant their evidence was flawed.
11. Ms X also complains about the way the Council responded to her complaint about this. It is not a good use of public resources to investigate complaints about complaint procedures, if we are unable to deal with the substantive issue.

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Final decision

12. We will not investigate this complaint. This is because it is unlikely we could find fault and we will not investigate the conduct of Tribunal proceedings.

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Investigator's decision on behalf of the Ombudsman