Date of decision: 04 June 2025
Summary
Redbridge Council received a complaint about severely delaying an Occupational Therapy assessment required for a Disabled Facilities Grant, leaving a severely disabled resident at risk in unsuitable housing for months.
What happened
The resident, Mr X, was living in a property with stairs separating his bedroom and bathroom, neither of which were on the ground floor. Mr X is disabled and cannot use the stairs without assistance. In December 2023, after several falls on the stairs, he asked Redbridge Council for adaptations to his house to meet his needs.
An initial OT assessment in February 2024 identified the need for significant adaptations such as a stairlift or a ground floor extension and Mr X was placed on a waiting list for a full OT assessment with the community OT service.
Mr X complained in October 2024 about the lack of action from the Council in carrying out his OT assessment.
In early January 2025, the Council issued a final complaint response in which it was stated that Mr X was advised of a waiting period of 18 to 24 months for an OT assessment and that Mr X had only been on the waiting list for 10 months. The Council said it would carry out a telephone screening to determine if it could further prioritise an assessment for Mr X.
The Council did not uphold Mr X’s complaint as it said it had “followed process and there were no shortcomings” identified.
At the end of January 2025, however, the Council finally completed Mr X’s OT assessment and determined a ground floor extension might be necessary as a stairlift for the second floor would not be possible.
What was found
The Council failed in its statutory duty by taking eight months longer than allowed by government guidelines for ‘non-urgent, complex works’, the category which Mr X’s adaptation fell under, which requires completion of OT assessment (the guidance calls these stages one two) within 90 working days. The Council should have carried out Mr X’s OT assessments by May 2024. This unjustifiable delay led to significant distress, frustration and uncertainty for the resident, who remained in unsafe conditions.
The Ombudsman ordered the Council to pay £300 for the distress and to apologise to Mr X, finding a clear breach of process but acknowledging current action on service improvements.
Points to note for councils, professionals, people using services and their carers, advocacy groups and members of the public
The Housing Grants, Construction and Regeneration Act 1996 sets out the legal framework for disabled facilities grants and makes it a statutory duty for councils to consider requests for adaptations that are necessary and appropriate to meet a disabled person’s needs, and reasonable and practicable. The government’s non-statutory guidance from March 2022 on the delivery of these grants named “Disabled facilities Grant Delivery: Guidance for local authorities in England” expects stage one and two processes, including required OT assessments, to be completed within clear maximum timescales according to urgency and complexity. Councils are recommended to treat cases as urgent if the person is coming out of hospital and at risk, living alone and at risk, severe cognitive dysfunction and at risk, living with a carer who is elderly and disabled, living without heating or hot water and at risk and limited life expectancy. Good practice demands that councils fully inform people about the process, provide access to advice, and act promptly.
Community care law requires a council to liaise internally in order to ensure obligations under the Care Act 2014 are properly considered alongside grant and adaptation duties – the contact assessment by the OT should be a first stage for both statutory frameworks. The statutory wellbeing principle, the duty to assess needs, and the requirement to prevent or delay the development of need for care and support, offer a broader safety net than the Ombudsman’s narrow focus on the DFG framework. In practice, there should be proactive integration between adaptations, OT assessment and statutory social care obligations. Unreasonable waiting times for essential adaptations—especially when linked to fall risk—may engage not just the DFG statutory framework, but also the Care Act’s general duty to promote individual wellbeing, prevent deterioration, and protect against abuse and neglect. Where a delay risks urgent deterioration or harm, escalation within both the adaptations and adult social care systems is required as a matter of law, not discretion.
We do not know how the Investigator managed not to exclaim at the cheek or the ignorance of the staff who said that the Council had followed process and that no shortcomings had been identified! We suspect that a monthly compensatory payment for delay was not awarded because the investigator could not say that the application would definitely be approved.
The Council said it was doing the following to cut down on delay
- Screen and risk rate all the cases on the OT waiting list into high, medium and low priority. Depending on the priority, a trusted assessor can manage the case rather than a qualified OT
- Outsourcing cases
- Further recruitment of Occupational Therapists
- Training staff to become trusted assessors
- Weekly allocation meetings with senior OT’s to discuss new referrals and those already on waiting lists
- Fortnightly group meetings to develop initiatives to support how the OT waiting list can be effectively managed
Please use the following link if you want to read the original Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman’s London Borough of Redbridge (24 017 469) report.
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