Wakefield City Council (24 010 654)
Category : Children's care services > Looked after children
Decision : Closed after initial enquiries
Decision date : 08 Jan 2025
The Ombudsman's final decision:
Summary: We will not investigate this complaint about a restriction placed on Mrs X’s grandchild in a children’s home run by the Council. The restriction imposed was within the range open to professionals to decide, and an investigation by us would be unlikely to find fault.
The complaint
- Mrs X said staff at a children’s home prevented her grandchild from using a downstairs toilet. She said her grandchild had to go upstairs and wait to use the toilet, and that staff pressured the child to leave the toilet.
The Ombudsman’s role and powers
- We investigate complaints of injustice caused by ‘maladministration’ and ‘service failure’. I have used the word fault to refer to these. We consider whether there was fault in the way an organisation made its decision. If there was no fault in how the organisation made its decision, we cannot question the outcome. (Local Government Act 1974, section 34(3), as amended)
How I considered this complaint
- I considered information provided by the complainant and the Council.
- I considered the Ombudsman’s Assessment Code.
My assessment
- The correspondence the Council provided described the child’s obsessive use of the toilet. It stated it was not related to any need of the child’s need to relieve themselves, but to concerns about appearance such as wetting their hair repeatedly. It also stated the toilet was part of a downstairs wet room that had been decommissioned, and that residents were not permitted to use it. It also stated that the child had a tendency to remove their clothing in the toilet, which it wished to discourage outside the child’s own room.
- The Council confirmed there was some delay in providing the child with a fob to access another bathroom, but that this was not intentional.
- If we were to investigate, we could not substitute our own judgement for the considered decision of professionals that the child should not use a downstairs toilet, that had been decommissioned, for purposes that were largely unrelated to relieving themselves.
Final decision
- We will not investigate Mrs X’s complaint because there is not enough evidence of fault by the Council to warrant this.
Investigator's decision on behalf of the Ombudsman