Summary: We will not investigate Mr X’s complaint about the Council’s handling of a child protection case because we could not achieve a worthwhile outcome, given the lapse of time since the events complained about.

The complaint

1. Mr X complained the Council:
• wrongly excluded the police from a child protection process to protect Ms Y, his ex partner, from action in relation to domestic abuse perpetrated against Mr X;
• concealed a police report from child protection meetings and did not share it with him in response to his subject access request;
• wrongly considered his complaint through its corporate complaints process rather than the children’s statutory complaints process.
2. Mr X said the Council’s actions have meant his complaint was not properly investigated either by the Council or other independent agencies and have seriously impacted on his mental health.

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The Ombudsman’s role and powers

3. 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:

• there is not enough evidence of fault to justify investigating, or
• there is another body better placed to consider this complaint, or
• there is no worthwhile outcome achievable by our investigation.

(Local Government Act 1974, section 24A(6), as amended, section 34(B))

4. The Information Commissioner's Office considers complaints about freedom of information. Its decision notices may be appealed to the First Tier Tribunal (Information Rights). So where we receive complaints about freedom of information or subject access requests, we normally consider it reasonable to expect the person to refer the matter to the Information Commissioner.

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How I considered this complaint

5. I considered information provided by Mr X and the Council.
6. I considered the Ombudsman’s Assessment Code.

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My assessment

Conduct of child protection

7. Mr X’s children were subject to child protection processes from late 2018 until April 2020. He previously complained to us about the Council’s handling of the child protection process, but is raising a further complaint, after having received copies of records after making a subject access request.
8. Mr X is particularly concerned the Council wrongly excluded the police from the child protection process. In its review of the case, the Council explained it had a strategy discussion with the police in November 2018. This is a meeting held for professionals where there are safeguarding concerns about children. Records of strategy discussions are not usually shared with parents, although they would be shared with the chair of any child protection conference that is subsequently arranged. It would be for the police, not the Council, to decide whether any police action was appropriate following the strategy meeting.
9. The Council said it invited the police to attend a child protection conference in January 2019. Mr X disputes this because he says there was no record to show the police were invited in the response to his subject access request.
10. The police did not attend the conference but sent a report. The Council said the chair was aware of the report and referred to it in general terms at the conference. It said it explained to Mr X at the time that it could not share the report with him due to its confidential nature and that it discussed this with him again a few months later.
11. Whilst I appreciate Mr X remains unhappy about the way the child protection process was managed, there is nothing worthwhile we could achieve if we investigated now, given the lapse of time. Therefore, we will not consider this part of the complaint further.

Subject access request

12. Mr X remains unhappy the Council has not shared the police report with him. We do not investigate complaints about responses to subject access requests. This is because the Information Commissioner’s Office is better placed to consider such complaints.

Complaints handling

13. Mr X complained the social worker at the time wrongly manipulated the complaints process so that his complaint was investigated using the Council’s corporate complaints process, rather than the statutory children’s complaints process, which would have given him the right to a stage 3 panel.
14. Complaints about child protection do not fall within the scope of the statutory children’s complaints process, and such complaints would usually be addressed through a council’s corporate complaints process. We will not consider this part of the complaint further because there is insufficient evidence of fault to justify our involvement.

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Final decision

15. We will not investigate Mr X’s complaint about the handling of the child protection process because we could not achieve a worthwhile outcome, given the lapse of time since the events complained about. We will not investigate his complaint about the failure to share a police report since there is another body better placed to consider that. We will not consider his complaint about the complaints procedure used to consider his complaint because there is insufficient evidence of fault to justify our involvement.

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Investigator's decision on behalf of the Ombudsman