Summary: We will not investigate this complaint about the Council’s assessment of a housing application. There is insufficient evidence of fault which would warrant an investigation.

The complaint

1. Miss X complained about the Council’s failure to properly consider her housing application for a number of years or to provide her with accommodation when she was homeless in previous years. She says she should have higher priority due to her medical circumstances and her difficult family circumstances.

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The Ombudsman’s role and powers

2. 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
• we could not add to any previous investigation by the organisation, or
• further investigation would not lead to a different outcome.

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

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How I considered this complaint

3. I considered information provided by the complainant and the Council.
4. I considered the Ombudsman’s Assessment Code.

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My assessment

5. Miss X says the Council has failed to give her housing application sufficient priority since 2023 and that in previous years it failed to offer her accommodation when she says she was homeless.
6. We will not investigate complaints about matters which took place more than 12 months before Miss X complained to us. The time for receiving complaints is from when someone became aware of the matter they wished to complain about, not when they complained to the Council or it issued its final response. We would expect someone to complain to us within a year, even if they were dissatisfied with the time the complaints procedure was taking.
7. We can consider the Council’s handling of her current housing application. Miss X says she has medical needs which have been ignored by the Council and that she has recently confirmed she is pregnant. She says the Council should give her higher priority for safeguarding reasons because she has been subject to threats from family members in her mother’s home.
8. The Council says it is currently undertaking a medical assessment of her housing application which requires evidence of her pregnancy. The Council cannot rehouse Miss X from the housing register as an emergency case and has advised her to make a homeless application for this situation. In its response to us the Council said that it had offered Miss X emergency accommodation in a safe area if she is concerned about threats from family members but she declined the offer.
9. The Ombudsman is not an appeal body. This means we do not take a second look at a decision to decide if it was wrong. Instead, we look at the processes an organisation followed to make its decision. If we consider it followed those processes correctly, we cannot question whether the decision was right or wrong, regardless of whether someone disagrees with the decision the organisation made.
10. The Council is re-assessing Miss X’s application given her latest change in circumstances and this may or may not change her application priority. This will depend on whether her circumstances meet the threshold for a higher banding under the Council’s housing allocations policy. We may not find fault with a council’s assessment of a housing application or a housing applicant’s priority if it has carried this out in line with its published allocations scheme. We recognise that the demand for social housing far outstrips the supply of properties in many areas.

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Final decision

11. We will not investigate this complaint about the Council’s assessment of a housing application. There is insufficient evidence of fault which would warrant an investigation.

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Investigator's decision on behalf of the Ombudsman