Summary: Ms X complains about the time taken by the Council to decide her homelessness application, the interim accommodation it put her in, and the time taken to review its suitability later on. The Ombudsman found there was fault caused by delays by the Council in deciding Ms X’s homelessness application and her request for a suitability review. It also gave her inaccurate information about reviewing the suitability of her accommodation at an earlier stage. The Council accepted our recommendation it should remedy this by apologising to Ms X, agreeing to pay a financial remedy and reminding staff of their obligations.

The complaint

1. Ms X complains the Council took too long to reach a decision on her homelessness application. She says it placed her in unsuitable temporary accommodation and told her she could not seek a review of the placement until it agreed she was homeless. When she did ask for a review, the Council took four months to consider it. It then took three months after agreeing the temporary accommodation was unsuitable to move her.
2. Ms X says the delays, and time spent in unsuitable temporary accommodation, isolated her from her family, affected her baby son and caused her to feel increasingly vulnerable due to the surroundings.

Back to top

The Ombudsman’s role and powers

3. 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)
4. 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)
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)

Back to top

How I considered this complaint

6. Ms X is represented by her local councillor in bringing her complaint to the Ombudsman. I spoke with her councillor, who I will refer to as Councillor Z, and considered documents he provided on Ms X’s behalf. I wrote to the Council to make enquiries and reviewed the material it sent in response.
7. The law on homelessness in England changed in April 2018 when the Homelessness Reduction Act 2017 came into force. However, as Ms X made her homelessness application in February 2018, the previous law and statutory guidance applies to it. Ms X’s later request for a review of the suitability of her temporary accommodation would use the law in place at the time of the request.
8. I shared a copy of my draft decision with Ms X and the Council and I invited them to comment on it.

Back to top

What I found

9. Ms X made a homelessness application in February 2018 in person at Council’s offices. The Council agreed to provide her and her infant son with interim accommodation while it made a decision. Local authorities must provide interim accommodation where they have reason to believe the applicant is homeless, eligible for assistance and in priority need.
10. The interim accommodation provided to Ms X was over an hour away in a neighbouring borough of London. She was unhappy with the distance she had to travel to return to the Council’s area to see her family and allow her son to socialise. In March 2018, Ms X wrote to the Council to complain about the location of the interim accommodation and to report issues with mice and antisocial behaviour. Ms X's housing officer replied to her in April 2018, pointing her to other agencies where appropriate and saying he considered the accommodation was suitable.
11. Councillor Z also made several enquiries on Ms X’s behalf. He pointed out the Council believed Ms X had regular access to a car, when in fact she had said she could occasionally use a car which belonged to another family member who was the main user of it. The Council told him it could not consider the suitability of Ms X’s interim accommodation until it had decided her case.
12. The Council says Ms X’s homelessness application was complex. The case notes show an officer wrote to her former letting agent to try to find out information about a past tenancy agreement. It appointed a new case officer in late July and, after meeting with Ms X, she was able to make a decision on 2 August. The Council accepted Ms X was homeless and it had a duty to provide temporary accommodation while it resolved her long-term housing needs. At this point Ms X’s accommodation became temporary instead of interim but she stayed at the same address.
13. The Council told the Ombudsman it took from February to August 2018 to reach a decision on Ms X’s homelessness application because of staff absence and the impact of introducing the Homelessness Reduction Act. However, it accepts it took too long and has already apologised to Ms X via Councillor Z.
14. The decision letter from the Council told Ms X she could request a review of the suitability of her temporary accommodation by writing to ‘Team Principal Housing Management’ within 21 days. The letter gave no information on how to do this or what was required. Ms X wrote to the case officer the day after her decision to ask if she could have a ‘suitability check’ for her temporary accommodation. The case officer directed Ms X to her housing officer. Ms X wrote to him by email on 17 August and he replied saying she should write explaining she wanted a formal suitability review and explaining why. He told her a decision could take up to 56 days but did not mention she had 21 days to submit her request.
15. Ms X sent the information outlining her review request to the housing officer by email on 27 August. She mentioned hazards in the property for her infant son, mould and concerns about the local area. The next note on the file shows the housing officer emailed another officer on 23 October, forwarding Ms X’s request. He said, “this email was sent a few months ago and was overseen by myself due to work load demands.”
16. The Council started work on Ms X’s review request at that point, although it rightly accepted in its own internal statistics it received it on 27 August. The Council reached a decision on 21 December. It confirmed Ms X’s accommodation was unsuitable because of overcrowding. It said it would put her on the transfer list for a move to alternative accommodation. There was no reference to the other points Ms X mentioned in her review request.
17. The Council identified alternative accommodation for Ms X on 12 March 2019. It says it invited her to sign paperwork relating to it on 18 March, and she moved in the following day. The Council says it took that amount of time to find alternative accommodation for Ms X because the circumstances of other cases meant they took priority.

Back to top

Analysis

18. There are several aspects to Ms X’s complaint and I will deal with them in turn.
19. The time taken by the Council to decide Ms X’s homelessness application is the first part of the complaint. The statutory guidance in place at the time suggested local authorities should aim to decide a homelessness application within 33 days. That is not a strict time limit and whether there is fault depends on the circumstances of the individual case.
20. This case took much longer than 33 days. I have considered the reasons given by the Council explaining why it took longer. However, the case notes do not support its position the case was complex. There was a degree of dependence on the outcome of an enquiry to Ms X’s former letting agent but, when it did not respond quickly, there is no evidence the Council chased it up. In fact, there is very little evidence of activity at all and it is not clear what the original case officer was doing to progress Ms X’s case. Further support for the fact it was not complex is found in it only taking around a week after assigning a new case officer to make a decision.
21. I have decided the time taken to resolve Ms X’s homelessness application was fault in the circumstances of this case. This caused Ms X a significant personal injustice in the form of frustration, which I can see in her regular complaints and correspondence via Councillor Z. However, I recognise the Council has already apologised and decided Ms X’s application over a year ago now. I will consider any further remedy needed for the injustice caused here as part of the wider findings in this case.
22. The next part of Ms X’s complaint is about the Council’s allocation of unsuitable interim accommodation. It is true the Council found it to be unsuitable in December 2018. However, this was only on the grounds of overcrowding. The Council did not set out its decision in a formal decision letter. Instead it sent a fairly short email, and although the decision was favourable to Ms X, the email did not address all the points she had raised.
23. Based on overcrowding alone, it is not true to say the accommodation was always unsuitable. The Housing Act 1985 says local authorities only need to include children over one year of age in a headcount. Therefore, it was only when Ms X’s son reached his first birthday it had to take account of him. As they were in a one-person studio flat, it was at that point it became overcrowded in the eyes of the law.
24. I believe if Ms X had asked for a suitability review on or after her son’s first birthday, the Council would have put her on the transfer list within 56 days of then. Instead, it took it a further six months to do that. I also took into account the wider issues Ms X raised in her review request. The case notes show her housing officer carefully considered the concerns she raised about suitability in April 2018 and decided there were no grounds to move her then.
25. Councillor Z was writing to the Council around that time too, outlining concerns about the suitability of Ms X’s accommodation. The Council gave confusing information to him and Ms X. In July 2018, it told Councillor Z, “[Ms X] cannot request a review of the accommodation until we have come to a decision”. Yet later, in January 2019, it said she, “would not have had to wait for a [decision on her homelessness application] if she felt her temporary accommodation was unsuitable”. It said the housing officer could have considered any queries she had.
26. The Council was right to say Ms X had no legal right to a review of the suitability of her interim accommodation, before it had taken a final decision on her homelessness application. However, the position it outlined in January 2019 better reflects what the Ombudsman expects. The earlier explanation was too simple, and likely misled Ms X, and was therefore fault.
27. Although I believe Ms X stayed in unsuitable accommodation for longer than she might otherwise have done, I am satisfied overall this was only on the grounds of overcrowding. The comments from her housing officer in April 2018 show he considered her wider concerns then. There is no evidence to suggest the officer carrying out the formal suitability review would have reached a different judgement. In fact, when he eventually forwarded Ms X’s review request on, the housing officer commented the only potential reason he could see to uphold it was overcrowding.
28. In considering the injustice caused to Ms X here, I conclude the overcrowding itself was quite limited. Ms X was living in a studio flat with her infant son and, although far from ideal, I am satisfied this caused her no significant injustice. In reaching this decision I have taken account of the case Ms X put forward in her review request in August 2018.
29. Ms X also complained about the Council’s reliance on her having regular access to a car as part of its rationale for allocating her temporary accommodation outside of its area. The evidence I have seen shows the Council recorded Ms X’s method of transport at the time she reported she was homeless as “drive”. It later accepted in correspondence with her local councillor this was not correct. However, it also said this did not affect its view of the suitability of the accommodation, as when using public transport the travel time was still less than 90 minutes.
30. The Council’s error in recording Ms X’s mode of transport was fault. However, there is no evidence this caused her any significant injustice. The Council’s records show there was no closer property available to allocate to Ms X, and the travel time was still within the range the Council’s policy deemed reasonable whether by car or public transport.
31. The next part of Ms X’s complaint is about the time taken by the Council to deal with her review request. The law sets a time limit of 56 days for completing a statutory review. In this case, the Council’s own statistics show it took 116 days. Having asked for information about other review requests in that period, the time taken to complete the review on Ms X’s case was one of the longest. At that point, the Council was only dealing with around a third of review requests within the legal time limit. However, the failure of her housing officer to forward her request for two months clearly had the biggest impact on the time taken in Ms X’s case.
32. The mishandling and delay in considering Ms X’s suitability review request was fault. I am satisfied this caused Ms X a significant personal injustice through frustration. This was also a topic on which she had to routinely complain to the Council, either directly or via Councillor Z. I have set out a remedy at the end of this statement for the combined injustice caused by the delay in deciding both Ms X’s homelessness application and her review request.
33. The final issue raised in Ms X’s complaint is the time taken by the Council to identify alternative accommodation for her. It decided on 21 December her temporary accommodation was unsuitable. The Council points out this was the last working day of 2018 and so it did not start work on the case again until 2 January. From then, I have worked out it took the Council just under 10 weeks to find Ms X somewhere to move to.
34. There is no legal time limit for this process and so we would expect the Council to be able to justify why it took the time it did. In this case, it has provided me with details of the other people it moved into accommodation of the type Ms X was waiting for. It has also explained why those others had higher priority. In the circumstances, I cannot say the Council’s actions here were fault. Priority is a professional judgement matter relying on the consistent application of the Council’s own policies. In this case, there is no evidence it did not do so properly. I therefore cannot question the decision to move others before Ms X.

Back to top

Agreed action

35. I note the Council has already apologised to Ms X for the time taken to make a decision on her homelessness application.
36. By 11 December 2019, the Council has agreed to:
• Write to Ms X and apologise for the remaining fault identified in this statement. That is the way in which it explained her right to ask for a review of the suitability of her interim accommodation and the mishandling of the request once she made it in August 2018.
• Pay Ms X £250 in recognition of the delays in this case and the frustration caused to her as a result. This also represents a remedy for Ms X’s time and trouble in having to pursue this matter to the Ombudsman.
37. By 11 December 2019, the Council has agreed to remind:
• Housing officers of the importance of passing on statutory review requests to the reviewing officer(s) as soon as possible.
• All relevant officers about how the suitability of interim accommodation can still be informally reviewed by a housing officer, even though no statutory review right exists.
38. By 11 February 2020, the Council has agreed to revise the wording in its Section 184 letters, to provide a direct email or postal address for where to send suitability review requests, as opposed to a job title alone.
39. The Council should write to the Ombudsman to confirm when it has completed these actions.

Back to top

Final decision

40. There was fault in this case in several aspects of the Council’s handling of Ms X’s requests relating to her homelessness application and interim accommodation. This caused Ms X a significant injustice which it should remedy.

Investigator’s final decision on behalf of the Ombudsman

Back to top

Investigator's decision on behalf of the Ombudsman