Summary: Ms C complains, for Ms B, that the Council wrongly decided she does not qualify to join the housing register and has failed to take account of statutory overcrowding of her current accommodation. Also, the Council delayed in making its decision on her application. The Ombudsman finds there were some failings by the Council in its handling of this matter. These faults did not however cause Ms B significant injustice requiring personal remedy in addition to apologies already offered. The Council has agreed to the Ombudsman’s recommendations for service improvements.

The complaint

1. The complainant, whom I shall call Ms C, complains for Ms B that the Council wrongly decided she does not qualify to join the housing register and has failed to take into account her circumstances in making this decision, including statutory overcrowding of her current accommodation. In addition, the Council delayed in making its decision on her application. As a result of these failings, Ms B says she has remained in overcrowded accommodation unsuited to her needs.

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The Ombudsman’s role and powers

2. 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)
3. 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)
4. We cannot investigate late complaints unless we decide there are good reasons. Late complaints are when someone takes more than 12 months to complain to us about something a council has done. (Local Government Act 1974, sections 26B and 34D, as amended)

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How I considered this complaint

5. I considered all information provided by Ms C about this complaint. I made written enquiries of the Council and took account of the information and evidence it provided in response.
6. I provided Ms C and the Council with a draft of this decision and took account of all comments received in response.
7. Although this complaint was not made to the Ombudsman until July 2019, I exercised discretion to investigate matters back to the beginning of January 2018 when Ms B made her application to join the housing register. I did so to take account of Ms B’s language difficulties. However, my investigation has established that from April 2018 Ms C was acting as Ms B’s representative in communications with the Council.

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What I found

Ms B’s application to join the housing register

8. On 31 January 2018 Ms B completed an online application form to join the Council’s housing register. She set out that she was sharing a two-bedroom flat with six other people and that overcrowding was impacting her health. By 26 April she had received no response and Ms C contacted the Council about this. The application was then processed. The Council’s timescale for registering applications is 28 days. The delay, which the Council says was due to staff shortages and an increase in applications, was fault.
9. On 1 May 2018 the Council wrote to Ms B asking her to provide the documents needed in support of her application. On 14 May Ms B provided bank statements, payslips, a form P60, passport and residence card. The Council processed these on 26 June 2018. The Council's timescale for processing such evidence is 14 days. The delay was fault.
10. On 27 June the Council wrote to Ms B to advise that she still need to provide five years proof of address. The letter, wrongly dated 14 May 2018, advised in bold type that failure to provide the required documents within 14 days would result in closure of the application, and a new application would then be required.

Ms B’s stage one complaint to the Council

11. On 10 January 2019 Ms C made a complaint to the Council on behalf of Ms B. She said she had not received a decision on her application to join the housing register. The Council responded at the first stage of its complaint procedure on 17 January. It noted that it was Ms B’s claim that she had sent all the documents that had been requested by the Council. But she had not provided the required five years proof of address, required to satisfy the local connection criterion under the Council’s housing allocations policy. The Council said it would exercise discretion to allow her to submit this missing evidence now, and that when she submitted it she should call the telephone number given and the applications team would then be advised to go verify the application and make it active for bidding.
12. Ms B had also complained about delay in actioning her application. The Council referred to the 28-day timescale and the backlog in the application team but failed to acknowledge there had been any delay in dealing with Ms B’s application.

Further correspondence about the housing register application

13. On 5 February Ms B submitted a letter stating she believed that the requirement for five years residency in the borough did not need to be applied in her case as she was living in overcrowded accommodation. However, Ms B did not call the Council as she had been advised, and this meant that the correspondence bypassed the officer who had agreed in the complaint response to the exercise of discretion to allow late submission. Ms B’s application was closed in the normal way as consequence of delay in submitting required information, in line with the advice which had been given in June 2018 and without any further notification to Ms B. Although Ms B had not telephoned the Council as requested, a note might reasonably have been placed on the case records so that when correspondence was received it was brought to the attention of the relevant officer.
14. In mid-March Ms C exchanged emails with the Council. Ms C acknowledged there had been delays on Ms B’s part as well as on the part of the Council. She said Ms B had submitted the final supporting documents for her application on 5 February and could not provide five years proof of address as she had only moved to the borough in August 2015. Ms C said though that Ms B was living in severely overcrowded accommodation which should afford her reasonable preference and so allow her to join the housing register. Ms C confirmed Ms B had her own bedroom but was sharing bathroom and kitchen facilities with other households. A manager exercised discretion to re-open Ms B’s application and passed the detail to an officer for processing.
15. On 11 April Ms C asked for an update. The Council replied saying Ms B’s application was closed due to delay in providing information: the officer who issued this response was unaware that a manager had exercised discretion to re-open the application. Again, a note might reasonably have been placed on the case records about the exercise of discretion agreed, to avoid confusion.
16. On 17 May the Council wrote to Ms C by email. It said that based on initial assessment of the application Ms B did not meet the five-year local connection criterion. In subsequent correspondence the Council added that Ms B was not working in the borough and had provided payslips from an address in Leeds from 2018 and no other information to suggest she must reside in the borough. In respect of overcrowding, it went on to set out that it did not accept overcrowding in this case as Ms B was renting a room and had entered into an agreement to this effect, with shared facilities (in this case the kitchen and bathroom).

Ms B’s stage two complaint to the Council

17. A stage two complaint had been made on 26 March, and the response to this was issued on 28 May. This was outside the 15 working day timescale for response and the delay was fault. The response said Ms B did not qualify for the housing register and it reiterated the reasons previously given in the email of 17 May. The Council apologised for the fact that Ms B had not received its decision sooner.
18. The Council said if Ms B remained dissatisfied she could complain to the Housing Ombudsman Service. That was incorrect: Ms B should have been signposted to the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman.

Ms B’s request for review of the Council’s decision

19. On 30 May the Council received a request from Ms B for a review of its decision that she was not eligible to join the housing register. The review decision was issued on 12 August 2019 after Ms C made a complaint about the lack of response. The timescale for reviews is 28 days: the delay was fault.
20. The review decision noted that Ms B, a single applicant and not part of a larger household, exclusively rents a room within the shared dwelling as a tenant. The Council did not accept she was overcrowded under its policy or statutorily overcrowded. Reasonable preference had therefore been refused and she did not qualify to join the housing register.

The current position

21. Ms B reports that from 28 June 2019 the number of occupants in the dwelling reduced to five, including Ms B. The property has two bedrooms and a living room, and under the space standard for overcrowding this number of rooms can accommodate a maximum of five people.
22. The Council reports that enquiries in December suggested the property is not licenced as a house in multiple occupation, and it would carry out an inspection to determine how many occupants live at the address and whether a licence is required. If more people are found to be resident than permitted, the landlord would be expected to take steps to remedy this under the guidance of the enforcement licencing team.

Analysis

23. Under the Council’s housing allocations policy, it will look at how many rooms a household is lacking in comparison to their household size and housing need. Ms B as a single person household is assessed as requiring one room or bedroom: she had such a room, for her own use.
24. In terms of statutory overcrowding, application of the space standard in the period before the number of residents in the property reduced in June 2019 might on the face of it suggest overcrowding. However, the space standards apply to any premises let as a separate dwelling (which could be a flat or even just a room if it is let separately from the rest of the building). Ms B has a tenancy which is for a room with shared kitchen and bathroom facilities. The Council’s position was that Ms B was not overcrowded under the space standard given her rental of one room with shared facilities as described.
25. Having considered all the evidence, I find no fault with the Council’s position here.
26. As identified earlier in this statement, there were delays by the Council in the handling of the application and review and the complaint about these matters, and there were some failings in internal communication causing confusion which might have been avoided. Ms B and her representative were put to some time and trouble as a result. Some apologies have however been offered. Taking account of the fact that there were also delays by Ms B in submitting necessary information, and that the review of the Council’s decision did not lead to a different outcome for her, there is no significant injustice requiring a recommendation for further personal remedy.

Agreed action

27. To ensure that service improvements are made as a result of this complaint, I recommended that within three months of the date of the decision on this complaint the Council:

• Reviews lessons learned from this complaint, and implements an improvement plan to ensure that, so far as is possible, delays in processing applications for the housing register, in processing requests for reviews, and in complaint handling do not occur;
• Ensures relevant staff have appropriate information to enable referral to the correct Ombudsman service at the conclusion of the complaints process; and
• Provides evidence to the Ombudsman that the actions set out above have been taken.

28. The Council agreed to these recommendations and has confirmed these actions have now been completed.

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Final decision

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

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Investigator's decision on behalf of the Ombudsman