Summary: We will not investigate this complaint about the Council’s decision on the allocation of a leisure facility. Any injustice is not at a significant level sufficient to warrant an investigation. In any case, we could not achieve any meaningful outcome by investigating.

The complaint

1. Mrs X said she had been on a waiting list for access to a Council managed leisure facility for several years. She said she missed out on an offer to access the facility the previous year, through no fault of her own and was unhappy with the Council’s response to her complaint about this.
2. Mrs X said this means her family have missed out on the opportunity to use this facility and wants the Council to reinstate her position on the waiting list.

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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:

• any injustice is not significant enough to justify our involvement, or
• we cannot achieve the outcome someone wants, or

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

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How I considered this complaint

4. I considered information provided by Mrs X and I considered the Ombudsman’s Assessment Code.

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My assessment

5. In 2018, Mrs X applied to join a waiting list for a leisure facility managed by the Council. She said more recently she checked where she was on the list and discovered she had been moved to the bottom of the list.
6. When she asked the Council for an explanation, it told her it had sent an offer to the nominated email address it had on its records and when no one responded, it moved the request to the bottom.
7. Mrs X said the Council was at fault because it had not followed this email up after it sent it and got no reply. She said it was also at fault because it had recently changed its policy, saying it was not liable for offers it had made but were not received by an applicant.
8. We will not investigate Mrs X’s complaint, because there is no significant injustice. Our role is to consider complaints where the person bringing the complaint has suffered significant personal injustice as a direct result of the actions or inactions of the organisation. This means we will normally only investigate a complaint where the complainant has suffered serious loss, harm, or distress as a direct result of faults or failures.
9. In any case, even if there was a significant injustice we would not investigate, because Mrs X wants the Council to now reinstate her position and we could not direct the Council to do this.

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Final decision

10. We will not investigate Mrs X’s complaint because there is no significant injustice and there is no meaningful outcome we can achieve.

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Investigator's decision on behalf of the Ombudsman