Summary: Ms B complains the Council has failed to deal correctly with her application for housing. The Ombudsman finds there were minor faults in this matter but that these did not lead to injustice for Ms B. However, there were faults in the Council’s handling of her complaint which led to avoidable frustration and time and trouble, and a payment recommended in recognition of this has been agreed by the Council.

The complaint

1. The complainant, whom I shall call Ms B, complains the Council has failed to deal correctly with her application for housing. The Council decided she made her accommodation more overcrowded, deliberately worsening her housing situation, by allowing her husband to move in with her and the children when he had accommodation available elsewhere.
2. Ms B also complained about issues of damp and mould in her tenancy.

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What I have investigated

3. I have investigated the actions of the Council in respect of Ms B’s application for housing.

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The Ombudsman’s role and powers

4. 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)
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)
6. We cannot investigate complaints about the provision or management of social housing by a council acting as a registered social housing provider. (Local Government Act 1974, paragraph 5A schedule 5, as amended)

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How I considered this complaint

7. I considered all the information provided by Ms B abut her complaint. I made written enquiries of the Council and took account of all the information and evidence it provided in reply.
8. I provided Ms B and the Council with a draft of this decision giving them the opportunity to comment, and took account of all comments received in response.

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What I found

Background

9. Ms B currently lives in a two-bed Council tenancy with her husband and six children. One of the children has a diagnosis of autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) and another a heart condition.

The Council’s housing allocation scheme

10. Every local housing authority must publish an allocations scheme that sets out how it prioritises applicants, and its procedures for allocating housing. All allocations must be made in strict accordance with the published scheme. (Housing Act 1996, section 166A(1) & (14))
11. An allocations scheme must give reasonable preference to applicants in certain categories, including people in overcrowded housing, and people who need to move on medical or welfare grounds. (Housing Act 1996, section 166A(3))
12. The Council’s allocations policy places applicants in four priority bands numbered one to four. In brief the bands and what they include are as follows:

• Band 1: Statutorily overcrowded (not where this has been caused by a deliberate act)
• Band 2: Includes applicants with severe medical, welfare award or disability where accommodation is unsuitable; or who have priority on welfare grounds and need to move urgently due to risk to health; applicants lacking an essential facility such as kitchen, bathroom etc; applicants where there is serious threat to the well-being of a child (emergency move needed confirmed by social services);
• Band 3: Includes overcrowded but not statutorily overcrowded households; and applicants with moderate medical priority where there is a clear objective need for a move and housing conditions are directly contributing to causing serious ill health; and
• Band 4: homeless applicants where no statutory duty is owed; and all other applicants.

Ms B’s banding under the scheme

13. Ms B’s application was in Band 3 from December 2015, on the basis that the property was overcrowded under the Council’s policy but not statutorily overcrowded as defined by the Housing Act 1985. This increased to Band 2 on welfare grounds, agreed by a social welfare panel on 4 October 2018 after Ms B submitted medical reports for her son which evidenced a moderate medical requirement for a move.
14. There are no minutes from the panel meeting, but the Council says the increased banding from 3 to 2 was awarded on welfare grounds. While the lack of panel minutes to clearly evidence the decision-making and the reasons for it is fault, this did not lead to injustice for Ms B as her priority for housing increased.
15. In December 2018 Ms B asked the Council to add her cousin to her application. She said the cousin was homeless and had nowhere to stay and that they helped with the child with ASD. Just prior to this, Ms B’s husband had been removed from her application following an investigation which established he had been living elsewhere since around 2016. The Council rejected Ms B’s application to have her cousin added and it wrote to her to advise of this on 23 January 2019. It said that as this person was not a spouse or dependent child then they could not be added without good medical or social reasons, which it felt was not the case here. It considered that while it might be helpful having the cousin in the household Ms B had not presented evidence to show she was incapable of independently caring for her children or needed live-in support with this. The Council has not been able to provide me with a copy of the letter of 23 January and that is fault. However, it is clear Ms B received it as in February she responded seeking a review of the Council’s decision. The Council issued its review decision on 13 March 2019, upholding the decision not to add the cousin to the housing application.
16. In May Ms B applied to the Council to have her husband added to her application for re-housing as he had moved back into the home. She said the property was now statutorily overcrowded and should be in Band 1.
17. The Council’s allocations policy includes the following in respect of the deliberate worsening of housing circumstances:
    “Where there is clear evidence and a conclusion can be properly drawn that an applicant has deliberately made worse their circumstances in order to achieve higher priority on the register….then reduced priority will be given…..Examples of this include….deliberately overcrowding property by moving in friends and or other family members who have never lived together previously and/or have not lived together for a long time, then requesting re-housing to larger accommodation. The list of examples is not exhaustive. This will ensure that households will not be treated as occupying overcrowded accommodation unless the overcrowding has come about by natural increases due to the birth/adoption of a child or the addition of other persons to the household with the written consent of the London Borough of Southwark”.
18. The Council considered Ms B had deliberately worsened her housing circumstances by adding a further adult to the household in the knowledge that it would cause statutory overcrowding. Applying its policy as set out above, the Council wrote to her on 19 June 2019 advising Band 1 would not be awarded as this was deemed a deliberate worsening of circumstances. The right to request review was appropriately given.
19. Ms B requested a review and on 7 August the Council issued its decision. It upheld the original decision not to award Band 1. The decision letter was comprehensive, evidencing reasoned consideration given to all relevant factors including the family’s specific circumstances and applicable policy and legislative considerations.

Priority stars within housing bands

20. The Council’s allocations scheme says where it needs to prioritise between applicants with reasonable preference it will take various factors into account. The Council has a ‘priority star’ scheme, through which it awards a star to people who should be prioritised. The stars are awarded on top of priority banding so, for example, someone in band one with two priority stars would have higher priority than someone with one star in the same band.
21. Priority stars may be awarded on a number of grounds, and these include people occupying statutorily overcrowded housing; people who need to move on severe medical or welfare grounds; working households; and people who are making a community contribution for example by undertaking voluntary work in the area over a period of time. The criteria for each star are set out in the Council’s allocations policy.
22. For the community contribution star in recognition of voluntary work, the Council’s policy says:
    “Volunteers must have been volunteering for a continuous period of at least 6 months up to the point of application, and the same at point of offer. Volunteering must be for a not-for profit organisation or a charity and must be for a minimum of 10 hours per month”.
23. The verification needed for such an award is described in the policy as:
    “A letter from a manager responsible for volunteers will suffice to confirm an applicant’s involvement and in fact that the applicant had undertaken a minimum of 10 hours voluntary work per month in the requested area for over a period of 6 months. This person must not be related to the applicant in any way.”
24. However, the Council has introduced an extra verification step with a view to reducing fraudulent claims. This allows the Council to make further enquiries with the relevant organisation to satisfy itself about the relevant facts.

Ms B’s priority stars

25. Ms B’s application had one priority star awarded from 2016 as a working household. Ms B also undertakes voluntary work and so in December 2017 she wrote to the Council seeking a priority star in recognition of this. The Council says her letter did not provide all the relevant detail about the start date and the number of hours volunteered. In January 2018 it therefore sent the organisation she volunteers for a form to complete with the relevant information. It did not receive a response.
26. Ms B subsequently completed three charge of circumstances forms asking for the community contribution star in September and December 2018 and in February 2019. In support of her request in March 2019 she submitted, electronically, a letter of support from the organisation she volunteers for, but the Council was unable to read this attachment and it asked her to send a scanned copy, or a hard copy by post. Ms B resubmitted on 17 April 2019 and on the same day the Council sent the verification form to the organisation, as before. The Council says it did not receive a response. Therefore, on 19 June 2019 it wrote to Ms B refusing her request for the community contribution star. The letter was poorly worded as it did not explain that additional evidence had been sought from the organisation but not provided: it simply said that she did not meet the criteria set out in the allocations policy. However, it did set out the right to request a review, and Ms B then exercised that right.
27. On review in August 2019 the Council decided to exercise discretion to act outside its normal procedures and to award the community contribution star. The Council’s actions in respect of the award of the priority star were not affected by fault.

Complaint handling

28. On 14 September 2018 Ms B made her complaint to the Mayor of London and this was passed to the Council to deal with.
29. Under the Council’s published complaints procedure, the timescale for response at the first stage is 15 working days. The Council did not respond to Ms B’s complaint until 21 January 2019. That delay was fault. The Council apologised for this, but there were inaccuracies and omissions in that response, and that was further fault. It said the Council had not received a change of circumstances form with a request to add the cousin, although there is such a form on file dated 20 December 2018; and it failed to refer to repairs issues Ms B had included in her complaint. Ms B requested escalation of her complaint to the next stage of the Council’s procedure. The Council’s response at that stage, which was issued in the relevant timeframe, contained further inaccuracy because it wrongly asserted that Ms B’s youngest twins were not on her housing application and that she would need to complete a change of circumstances form, and that she would need to request assessment for statutory overcrowding when they reached age one year old, when in fact they had reached age one in October 2018. However, the Council quickly corrected this error.

Analysis

30. As set out above, there were several minor faults by the Council in its handling of Ms B’s housing application. However, except for the complaint handling these did not lead to injustice for Ms B. The complaint handling errors meant that Ms B waited longer than she should have done for the conclusion of her complaint and she was caused some avoidable frustration and time and trouble as a result.

Agreed action

31. In recognition of the fault and injustice identified above, I recommended that within four weeks of the date of the decision on this complaint the Council pays Ms B £100.
32. I also recommended that within three months of the date of the decision on this complaint the Council reviews lessons learned from this complaint and identifies the measures it will take to secure service improvements to address the failings identified. The Council should advise the Ombudsman of these measures and of the timescale for implementation of any changes.
33. The Council agreed to my recommendations.

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Final decision

34. I have completed my investigation on the basis set out above.

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Parts of the complaint that I did not investigate

35. I did not investigate the alleged disrepair (damp and mould) in the tenancy. This is because the Ombudsman cannot investigate complaints about such matters in social housing. As a social housing tenant, Ms B could complain to the Housing Ombudsman service about these issues.

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Investigator's decision on behalf of the Ombudsman