Summary: Ms X complained about the Council wasting money in prosecuting her for fraud when it has neglected spending on homelessness in the area. The Ombudsman should not investigate this complaint. This is because there is insufficient evidence of any injustice to Ms X caused by the Council’s budgetary decisions.

The complaint

1. The complainant, whom I shall call Ms X, complains about the Council wasting money on investigating and prosecuting her for fraud when it has not spent sufficient amounts on homelessness in the city. She says the Council should compensate her for the stress she suffered and the loss of her job following the prosecution.

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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’. We provide a free service but must use public money carefully. We may decide not to start or continue with an investigation if we believe:

• it is unlikely we would find fault, or
• the fault has not caused injustice to the person who complained, or
• we cannot achieve the outcome someone wants.

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

3. 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)
4. We cannot investigate a complaint about the start of court action or what happened in court. (Local Government Act 1974, Schedule 5/5A, paragraph 1/3, as amended)

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How I considered this complaint

5. I have considered all the information which Ms X submitted with her complaint.

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What I found

6. Ms X says the Council did not spend sufficient funding on preventing homelessness in its area when it also pursued her for fraud and she lost her job. She says the Council should not waste public money pursuing individuals and should spend the money on homelessness in the city.
7. We will not investigate the issues relating to the Council’s prosecution of Ms X for fraud. She made a complaint to us in 2018 about the Council’s fraud investigation and the conduct of its officers. We closed the complaint in 2019 because the investigation took place in 2016 and it was too long ago for us to investigate. We also decided that we would not have been able to investigate because the Ombudsman has no authority to consider what took place during court proceedings.
8. Ms X’s complaint about insufficient funding for homelessness involves no personal injustice to her because she is not homeless and she has not needed to use the Council’s services. It is a matter for the Council to decide how to spend its budget and it has a statutory duty towards homeless applicants.

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Final decision

9. The Ombudsman should not investigate this complaint. This is because there is insufficient evidence of any injustice to Ms X caused by the Council’s budgetary decisions.

Investigator’s final decision on behalf of the Ombudsman

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Investigator's decision on behalf of the Ombudsman