Overview:

Key to names used

• Mr X The complainant
• Ms Y A relative
• Charity A A housing charity

Summary

Mr X, a person with disabilities and complex needs, complained about the Council’s response when he became homeless. The Council’s housing team delayed helping him when he was being evicted from private rented accommodation. It then provided him with unsuitable interim accommodation, and at times left him with no accommodation. The Council’s adult social care (ASC) team failed to ensure his care needs were fully recorded and did not work proactively with its housing team to ensure any housing provided would meet his assessed care needs. He did not receive any support for his care needs after the morning call on the day he was evicted and on another weekend when he had no accommodation. As a result of Council failings, Mr X was caused considerable stress and worry over many months before being evicted, had to sleep in his car for a weekend when the Council failed to provide housing, slept in his car for several weeks when it provided unsuitable accommodation and did not always receive his care package. Mr X said the lack of support with housing and his care needs adversely affected his mental and physical health, which meant he spent several weeks in hospital.

Finding

Fault found causing injustice and recommendations made.

Recommendations

The Council must consider the report and confirm within three months the action it has taken or proposes to take. The Council should consider the report at its full Council, Cabinet or other appropriately delegated committee of elected members and we will require evidence of this. (Local Government Act 1974, section 32(2), as amended)

The Council has agreed to also take the following action within three months of the date of this report:

• apologise to Mr X for the injustice caused by the failings identified. The Council should have regard to our Guidance on remedies, available on our website, which provides guidance on effective apologies;

• pay him £8,500 to remedy the stress and worry, and the impact on his mental and physical health. (This was calculated based on 14 months of delay and/or unsuitable accommodation from October 2022 to January 2024 at £500 a month. This is higher than the usual scale of £150 to £350 a month set out in our Guidance on remedies to reflect the significant injustice caused and his vulnerability, plus a further £1,500 for the impact on Mr X’s dignity and health caused by the missed care and support);

• pay him a further £424.50 to remedy the avoidable court costs he incurred;

• pay him a further £1045 to reimburse Mr X for removal costs and £259 for storage costs;

• liaise with Mr X to agree appropriate action to clear any sums owed in relation to parking tickets received as a result of parking close to the accommodation as he could not walk any further;

• remind relevant housing staff of the need to consider whether there are others who could reasonably be expected to live with an applicant. If the Council decides not to include other people in the applicant’s household, it should write to the applicant with its decision, setting out its reasons;

• remind relevant housing staff that interim and temporary accommodation should be suitable for the applicant and their household, which includes ensuring they can receive care in line with their assessed needs;

• review its process for rebooking interim and temporary accommodation to ensure that it provides appropriate reasonable adjustments for disabled applicants, who would otherwise have difficulty attending its offices for the time required for this;

• remind relevant housing staff of the need to contact the Council’s ASC team if an applicant who is receiving a care package is being moved to alternative accommodation and, unless there is a genuinely urgent need to move quickly, to give the ASC team sufficient notice so the care package can be transferred so there is no interruption in care. If there is an urgent need to move the applicant, the Council should record the reasons it could not give advance notice to its ASC team;

• share a summary of the learning from this decision, as well as the full report, with relevant officers in its housing and ASC teams to ensure that lessons are learned from what went wrong in this case and consider what steps can be taken to ensure the two teams work more effectively together in future to prevent recurrence of the faults identified; and

• review how it provides services to homeless people with care needs, which is reported to a relevant committee of elected members.

Before finalising this report, the Council carried out a fresh assessment of Mr X’s care needs, in which it set out its reasons for concluding he did not have overnight care needs. Therefore, we did not need to make a formal recommendation about this.

The Council has recently agreed on another complaint to us to remind officers about the contents of paragraph 6.35 to 6.38 of the Homelessness Code of Guidance for Local Authorities, and to provide evidence of the action it is taking to procure interim accommodation in its area, so no further recommendations are needed here about those matters.

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