This fact sheet is for people with disabilities (or someone caring for them) who are experiencing problems with adaptation to their home and may be considering making a complaint to the Ombudsman.

I have a problem with adaptations to my home to make it suitable for me. Can the Ombudsman help me?

In some cases, yes. By law the council may be responsible for providing help to people with a wide range of disabilities. This is to enable them to move in and out of their homes, to access and use living and sleeping areas, cooking, bathing, and toilet facilities within the home.

This may involve the council's adults or children's services and housing departments and the provision of grant funding. We can look at complaints about these. 

If you are a council tenant, your landlord might have a different scheme for adapting its own properties. However, you can still apply for a Disabled Facilities Grant. You may be able to complain to both this Ombudsman and the Housing Ombudsman Service. If your complaint is about the actions of both a social landlord and the local authority, the Housing Ombudsman and the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman may decide to do a joint investigation.

When other organisations (for example home improvement agencies and voluntary organisations) are involved in delivering adaptations, we can look into their actions only if they are taken on behalf of the council.

How do I complain?

You should normally complain to the council first. If you live in an area with a county council and a district or borough council, the district or borough council is responsible for making decisions about DFG applications. You might be assessed by the county council first. Depending on what your complaint is about, you might need to complain to both councils.

The council’s policy should say how long it will take to respond. Our Complaint Handling Code says councils should have no more than two stages in a complaint process. The longest a complaint should take is 16 weeks.

The council should provide you with updates on your complaint, including when it may take longer to respond.

If your complaint is not making any progress, you can follow our top tips for making a complaint to find out what is happening.

If you complained more than 16 weeks ago, and you have not received a final response, we may be able to make enquiries about what is happening to your complaint. You should have tried to check up with the council what is happening before contacting us about any delay.

If the council has sent you a final response (usually saying something like ‘this is our final response’) and are unhappy with the outcome, you can complain to us.

You should normally make your complaint to us within 12 months of realising that the council has done something wrong.

If you can consider my complaint what will the Ombudsman look for?

We consider whether the council has done something wrong in the way it went about dealing with your request for adaptations or help with them which has caused you problems. Some of the issues we can look at are whether the council:

• failed to give you information you should have
• failed to assess your need for adaptations
• failed to consider some relevant information in an assessment
• delayed in dealing with your request for help
• failed to provide a service or adaptation which it had decided you need
• failed to tell you about a decision it had reached
• did not tell you how to challenge a decision if you disagree with it, or
• did not keep you informed, or failed to reply to letter, emails, and telephone calls.

The Government issued guidance for councils about delivering DFG funded adaptations. The guidance sets out policy frameworks, legislative duties and powers, and recommended best practice, in one place.

What happens if the Ombudsman finds the council was at fault?

It depends on what the fault was and what consequences it had for you. Sometimes things go wrong but do not affect the outcome. And sometimes the faults mean that someone has struggled without proper access to the facilities in their home for longer than they should.

Where we find fault with the council's procedure we will often ask the council to make changes so the same problem does not occur again. Where the consequences of what happened have been significant, we can recommend that the council takes action to put the matter right.

Sometimes, delay can make a situation worse, so we can ask the council to take some extra action which wouldn't have been needed if it had done everything properly  first.

Sometimes it will be appropriate for the council to make a payment to acknowledge the distress its actions have caused, and for the impact of unreasonable delay. The amount we ask for would depend on exactly how you have been affected. We can also take account of whether here was any action you took which made the situation worse, or action you could have taken to improve matters.

Examples of complaints we have considered

Other sources of information

• You can contact the Housing Ombudsman Service at www.housing-ombudsman.org.uk by telephone on 0300 111 3000, or by email at info@housing-ombudsman.org.uk
• Disabled Facilities Grant (DFG) delivery: Guidance for local authorities in England at Disabled Facilities Grant (DFG) delivery: guidance for local authorities in England - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)“

Our fact sheets give some general information about the most common type of complaints we receive but they cannot cover every situation. If you are not sure whether we can look into your complaint, please contact us.

August 2025