Decision Date: 25 July 2024
Summary: The Ombudsman upheld the complaint of Ms X, whose daughter received a bill for £20,000 for time she had spent in supported living from 2015 to 2022, although she cannot manage her own finances and was not ever properly informed by the Council about the care charges.
What happened:
In August 2015, the Council undertook a financial assessment for Ms X’s daughter, Ms Y, for her Community Care Services.
The Council wrote to both Ms X and Ms Y to confirm Ms Y’s care contribution. In October, a support worker in Ms Y’s supported accommodation organised the setting up of a standing order.
[We are not told how it came about that Ms Y held a bank account or HOW this standing order was authorised].
Once a year until 2019, the Council reviewed Ms Y’s financial assessment and sent the outcome of the reassessment to Ms Y and her support worker.
In September 2019, the Council received a returned letter for charges. They investigated and confirmed that Ms Y still resided at that address and the Council’s disability services confirmed it considered Ms Y to have capacity to manage her own financial affairs. No capacity assessment was carried out, however, to underpin this decision.
Ms Y moved to a new address in October 2019 and informed the Council. While the Council did update their Adult Social Care system with this information, they did not update their billing system.
Ms Y cancelled the standing order in November 2019 because she was no longer receiving care in the original setting. She had paid all of her care contribution charges until this point.
In April 2020, an updated financial assessment (uprated for increases in benefits) was sent to Ms Y at her new address, stating that as of that March, she was to pay £91.61 each week in care charges. Her monthly bills in April, May and June were sent to her old address, but this was corrected in July, but nobody organised or supported Ms Y to pay the bills.
By December 2022, Ms Y agreed to receive direct payments for her services, with the help of Ms X.
Ms X signed a direct payment agreement in February 2023, shortly after the Council completed a further financial assessment, the outcome of which was sent to Ms X and Ms Y.
In March 2023, the Council confirmed to Ms X and Ms Y that Ms Y would need to pay £70.43 per week, into the direct payment account, which was being paid net of the charges, and that she so far owed £895.47.
Ms X queried the financial assessment and in response the Council sent her a financial assessment form. Ms X asked that she was to be contacted in regard to anything to do with her daughter’s financial matters. The Council updated their records to reflect this request.
In October 2023 the Council noted that Ms Y had not used her direct payments since that June.
They confirmed that Ms Y was no longer using her direct payments and so in December 2023 the Council arranged to remove all client contribution costs since June 2023.
In January 2024 they sent Ms Y a revised invoice following the completion of another financial assessment of £1,852.42 for the period of 6 January to 7 June 2023.
They then sent Ms X a ‘first reminder’ for unpaid older client care charges from 7 May 2020 to December 2022.
Ms X then complained to the Council on 29 January 2024. She said that:
- Ms Y had resided in supported living accommodation until November 2022 when she had moved back home.
- The Council has billed Ms Y for £17,000 of charges for her time in supported living which Ms X was not ever made aware of.
- Ms Y is not capable of understanding letters about finances and money.
- The Council did not help Ms Y set up payments towards her care costs [as it had done before] and the Council has allowed this debt to accrue.
- The Council had now charged £1,800 for ‘Partnership for Independence’ service payments but Ms X was not aware the Council would charge for this service.
- The Council had provided a Grant for Ms Y but this went unused and the Council has now reclaimed this.
The Council responded on 6 February 2024. It said that:
- It assessed Ms Y as needing to pay client care contributions back in 2015.
- Ms Y paid the client care contributions until 2019.
- The outstanding invoice of £15,339.64 covered Ms Y’s client care contributions for the period 9 March 2020 to 1 December 2022.
- The second invoice for £1,852.42 cover the period 6 January 2023 to 7 June 2023 for Ms Y’s Partnership for Independence contributions.
- It had completed financial assessments for Ms Y’s contributions and sent notifications advising of the client care contributions owed all along.
What was found:
Charges from March 2020 to December 2022
The Investigator found fault with the Council’s failure to update their records of Ms Y’s address on their social care billing system after she moved. This error meant that Ms Y only received the financial assessment letters once per year in 2020, 2021 and 2022 but no bills.
Given that Ms Y could not understand how to manage her own finances, these financial assessment letters would not have been useful information for her.
The Council also failed to follow up the unpaid charges with Ms Y meaning she would have been unaware of money owed to the Council.
The Council also failed to communicate with Ms X about Ms Y’s financial affairs: they did not inform Ms X about any of the outstanding charges on Ms Y’s account from the period March 2020 – December 2022 until January 2024.
The Council accepted fault for its actions in managing Ms Y’s client care contributions and in how it responded to Ms X’s complaint. The Council offered to waive the full charges from March 2019 to December 2022, which the Investigator deemed suitable.
The Council were also at fault in their approach to assessing Ms Y’s capacity to manage her financial affairs. Their own records showed that Ms Y displayed certain behaviours that might indicate an inability to manage one’s own finances.
Ms X had also told the Council in 2019 that Ms Y does not understand charges, cannot budget and was reckless with money.
An application was also made for a corporate appointee to help Ms Y manage her finances but this was withdrawn because it was regarded as unaffordable for Ms Y.
[It is not clear here whether the investigator meant in-house appointeeship from the Council or professional appointeeship from someone like Money Carer Foundation, but please see below for our astonishment that nothing was said by the council or the Ombudsman about it being able to be claimed back (deducted from one’s income available for charging) as Disability Related Expenditure!]
The Council accepted fault for failing to complete the required mental capacity assessment of Ms Y in 2019.
‘Partnership for Independence’ charges
The Investigator found that the Council made Ms X suitably aware of the costs for the Partnership for Independence payments and did not find fault. And although the Council’s delay in completing the new financial assessment that would have confirmed the precise sum due, amounted to a fault, that assessment did not depart dramatically from the costs initially predicted by the Council and shared with Ms X.
Since the Council made Ms X aware of these costs and Ms Y accessed the care from January 2023 to June 2023, the Council was entitled to bill for the cost of this care.
However, the Investigator did state that the Council should provide an apology to Ms X for the delay in confirming the exact cost of this care.
Ms Y’s Grant
Ms X also complained that her daughter was given a grant by the Council, but the Council failed to make either her or her daughter aware of it, so it was unused and recouped by the Council.
However, the Council said it did not give any Grant funding for Ms Y. There is no evidence of any Grant funding award to Ms Y and so no fault or injustice.
[So this was a puzzle which is left unresolved by the report.]
Points to note for councils, professionals, people using services and their carers, advocacy groups and members of the public:
This investigation again demonstrates the importance of adequate record-keeping when communicating with service users, and ensuring that essential information for the delivery of social services, like one’s correct address, is shared appropriately.
Failing to keep Ms Y’s address up-to-date meant vital financial charging information did not reach her, or indeed her mother. This made effective communication impossible. But even if the Council in this case had had up-to-date and consistent internal records, there was a failure to effectively engage with Ms Y and her family.
We are not told why Ms Y cancelled the original standing order – wherever she moved to, the care carried on, we expect, and we ARE told that she did not move back home until 2022, from supported living, somewhere.
We are not told if Ms X was a formal appointee.
We are not told whether the Council sought the consent of Ms Y to corresponding with her mother about her financial affairs, if her mother was NOT the appointee.
Being a signatory on a direct payment agreement does not make one responsible for the charges for social care, because one is only helping the person to manage the direct payment, not the charging element, beyond paying it IN to the direct payment account if it’s needed for buying the services.
More support seems to have been needed, here, for Ms X, not just Ms Y, we would suggest.
We are not told why it was regarded as ‘fair’ that the charge be waived, but the LGSCO usually endorses that sort of a stance when the money has in fact been spent because the person cannot be expected to pay it back; in this case, we do not get to hear on what it might have been spent? All we can say is that the report makes it clear that the Council OFFERED to waive this money, which is perhaps surprising in view of the state of all Councils’ own financial positions, right now!
We note that Ms Y was regarded as having sufficient capacity to make a request for a direct payment in her own name and it appears that she nominated Ms X to help her manage it, which is perfectly in tune with the legal framework. We aren’t told why the direct payment was not spent for a long period. And what is not clear is why Ms X was given the paperwork to sign, for the Direct Payment – she is not obliged to HOLD the budget, if she is merely helping to manage it.
The report would suggest that whilst Ms Y was supposedly able to understand the essence of a direct payment, and what it means to hold one, she was not sufficiently capacitated to manage her own money and finances.
So she should most probably have had an appointee. She also should have been able to claim the cost of any professional appointeeship back as Disability Related Expenditure.
We can’t understand why the Ombudsman’s report doesn’t say so, give the line taken in plenty of other reports where the LGSCO has upheld the person’s interest in choice of an appointee, and not just been obliged to accept in-house Client Affairs appointeeship, just because it was offered on a free or low-cost basis!
It is also important to note that failing to share or critically examine information in their own records on Ms Y’s possibly limited capacity to manage her own financial affairs led to a serious finding of fault by the Investigator. While an individual should be assumed to have capacity to manage their own financial affairs, local authorities, private care providers, and families should be attuned to signs that someone’s capacity might have changed. This is what professional antennae are for!
Please use the following link if you want to read the original Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman’s London Borough of Barking & Dagenham (23 018 262) report.
If you are affected by the issues in this report, please consider asking a free, one-off question, anonymously, at a level of principle, here. Our experts’ response will give you an opinion which may then help you and the broader community, when posted.
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