Date of decision: 20 February 2026
Summary
A woman with care needs asked the Council for a care assessment but then waited many months beyond its own 28‑day target before her needs were assessed and her care package set up. During that time she had no funded support, her health deteriorated, and when direct payments finally started the Council initially funded only part of her assessed support, omitting the social‑support element.
What happened
In September 2024, Ms X contacted North Yorkshire Council to request a care assessment, explaining her care needs and saying she would be contactable after mid‑October 2024 to arrange it. The Council placed her on its waiting list. In November 2024 and again in March 2025, she contacted the Council for updates and was told both times she remained on the waiting list. In May 2025, she made a formal complaint about delays in completing her assessment, after many months without the support she had requested.
In June 2025 the Council sent a complaint response apologising for the delay in allocating a social worker, explaining that high demand in Adult Social Care had affected timescales, and saying it had introduced regular rescreening of waiting‑list referrals.
Later that month, Council staff visited Ms X at home and completed her care assessment, identifying a need for five hours of personal care and two hours of social support each week. By the end of June 2025 the Council produced a Care and Support Plan that confirmed these needs, totalling seven hours of weekly support, but when it set her personal budget it included only the five hours of personal care and omitted the two hours of social support.
The Council sent Ms X financial assessment forms which she returned by mid‑July 2025. In mid‑July 2025, the Council told her she would not need to contribute to her care costs and said a formal confirmation letter would follow. Despite the June assessment and July confirmation of zero contribution, the Council did not begin paying direct payments until October 2025, at which point it funded only five hours of personal care each week.
In November 2025 it sent the promised formal letter confirming her assessed contribution was zero.
In January 2026, after Ms X contacted the Council again, it reassessed her care needs, and increased her weekly care provision from five hours, amending her Direct Payments to reflect the updated level of support. In its submissions to the Ombudsman the Council accepted that it had in error omitted the two hours of social‑support provision from her personal budget and Direct Payments between October 2025 and the January 2026 reassessment, and explained it had already introduced service improvements to bring average assessment waiting times back within its 28‑day policy target.
What was found
The Ombudsman found the Council failed to meet its Care Act 2014 duty to complete Ms X’s needs assessment within a suitable and reasonable timescale, considering its own 28‑day standard, by taking from mid‑October 2024 until mid‑June 2025 to assess her – a delay of about seven months. This delay left her without assessed support, caused uncertainty, and represented a lost opportunity to have care in place sooner, especially given her reported deterioration in health.
The Council also delayed a further three months before starting Direct Payments after completing the assessment and producing the Care and Support Plan, which the Ombudsman found to be administrative fault because it postponed her ability to arrange the care the Council itself had identified she needed.
In addition, the Council was at fault for failing to include the assessed two hours of weekly social support provision in Ms X’s personal budget and Direct Payments between October 2025 and January 2026, so she missed funding for that element of her eligible needs. The Ombudsman noted the Council had already implemented service improvements that had reduced average assessment waiting times to within its 28‑day policy and therefore did not require further systemic action.
To remedy the injustice, the Council agreed within one month to apologise to Ms X, pay her £500 as a symbolic gesture for distress and lost opportunity caused by the delays, and pay into her Direct Payments account the amount equivalent to the missing two hours of social‑support funding per week from October 2025 until the increase in January 2026. The Ombudsman was satisfied these actions addressed the identified injustice and therefore upheld the complaint and closed the investigation.
Points to note for councils, professionals, people using services and their carers, advocacy groups and members of the public
A council’s duty to assess arises whenever an adult appears to have needs for care and support, regardless of resources or the council’s immediate capacity to allocate a worker. Community care law makes clear, through the Care Act and guidance on assessment, that delays must still be reasonable in the individual’s circumstances, and that assessment is a critical intervention in its own right, rather than something that can be left on a long waiting list until staffing pressures ease.
Local policies such as a 28‑day assessment timescale are only a starting benchmark; public law principles and community care law require the council to show that any departure was justified by evidence and remained proportionate to the person’s apparent needs and risks over time. In this case, the decision focuses on the Council’s failure to meet its own target, but does not explore whether repeated “waiting‑list” responses over some seven months met the statutory requirement for an appropriate and proportionate assessment process having regard to Ms X’s deteriorating health and wellbeing.
The duty to assess encompasses more than visiting and writing up needs; it includes eliciting desired outcomes and analysing impact on wellbeing domains such as physical and mental health, control over day‑to‑day life, and suitability of accommodation. Community care case law on assessment emphasises that failing to factor in the impact on wellbeing, fluctuating needs, and all relevant circumstances can render an assessment unlawful, yet the Ombudsman’s analysis does not examine whether the assessment documentation fully met these statutory content requirements in Ms X’s case.
Once eligible needs are identified, the duty to meet those needs arises immediately; care planning and finance processes must not be used as a reason for leaving a person with no funded support for months after assessment. The report correctly criticises delay in starting Direct Payments but does not explicitly anchor that criticism in the Care Act’s structure, under which the duty to meet needs is not conditional on a care plan being fully signed off or a financial letter having been issued, and under which even interim or urgent arrangements should be considered where waiting for routine processes would leave needs unmet.
The decision notes that service improvements have brought average waiting times back within the 28‑day policy and declines to require further systemic action, but public law principles suggest that compliance cannot be judged by averages alone where the statutory test is individual lawfulness. Community care law and recent case commentary highlight the need for councils to have governance mechanisms that prevent extreme outliers, ensure timely use of urgent or interim powers where risk escalates, and provide clear reasons and documentation when resource pressures affect timescales, yet those systemic safeguards are not examined in the report.
The Ombudsman never seems to refer to the fact that there is section 6 of the Local Authority Social Services 1970 imposing a duty on Members to ensure that social services has sufficient staff for the discharge of one’s functions – nor to mention that one does not have to be a social worker to do a social care assessment.
In practical terms, councils should treat any appearance of need as a trigger for a lawful assessment process with clear timescales, proactive risk‑based rescreening, and documented consideration of urgent or interim support rather than leaving people on passive waiting lists. They should ensure that personal budgets consistently reflect every element of assessed eligible need, that reasons for any discrepancy or delay are recorded and explained, and that advocacy and involvement rights are built into assessment and planning workflows so that people in Ms X’s position are supported to understand, challenge and press for lawful action when processes stall.
Please use the following link if you want to read the original Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman’s Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole Council (25 005 861) 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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