Date of decision: 27 November 2025
Summary
A disabled married couple with significant, 24‑hour care needs challenged the Council’s move from two night carers to one, arguing their safety could not be guaranteed. The Ombudsman found the Council had taken far too long to review and change their care, causing prolonged distress and uncertainty, but did not fault the professional decision to provide only one night carer.
What happened
Mr and Mrs X both have significant support needs which require 24-hour care. Mrs X lived in a different local authority (Council D) prior to her marriage to Mr X.
Council D provided Mrs X with an overnight carer and Mr X was provided with an overnight carer by West Sussex council.
Mrs X moved in with Mr X and the Council continued providing separate carers to assist with Mr and Mrs X care and support needs.
In June 2022, the Council carried out a review of Mr X’s support needs and informed Mr and Mrs X that they planned to reduce the number of overnight carers to one.
Mr and Mrs X complained to the Council that this posed theoretical safety concerns, as one individual could be left at grave risk if the carer was providing support to the other and was unable to respond.
The Council sought professional advice from an occupational therapist and the fire service on the issue raised. Mr X also provided a nocturnal log to evidence the need for separate overnight carers.
In July 2023, the Council informed Mr and Mrs X that it still intended on reducing night time support but, because so much time had passed since the initial review, further discussion was required to confirm that their needs had been captured and there had been no changes.
They did not routinely wake up every night, and in instances where they did, it was only a few times per night.
In May 2024, Mr and Mrs X submitted a formal complaint via their advocate about the decision to reduce night support. The Council did not uphold the complaint and repeated the previous reasons given by the social worker in the previous meeting.
Responding to the Ombudsman’s enquiries, the Council confirmed the new arrangement of one overnight carer had been implemented from February 2025.
What was found
The Ombudsman acknowledged that it is not any part of its role to decide what an individual’s needs are and what services they should receive. The Ombudsman instead considers if the Council has followed the correct process in accessing an individual’s needs.
The Ombudsman’s analysis noted that councils have a legal duty to meet eligible needs but are not obliged to provide everything people want, and that the Ombudsman’s role is to check whether the Council followed an appropriate process rather than to substitute a different professional judgement on the level of care.
The Ombudsman recorded that Mr and Mrs X said their needs had not changed and argued there was no justification for reducing either person’s care package, and they contended the Council could not lawfully merge their support plans because they should each be assessed and care‑planned as individuals.
The investigator followed Care Act statutory guidance (based on the law itself) and concluded that it allows Councils to take account of the circumstances of family members, including spouses, and to consider the overall budget position alongside individual needs when deciding how to meet eligible needs.
On that basis, the Ombudsman concluded the Council was not at fault in the way it decided to provide only one carer at night, pointing out that it had: discussed the proposal with the couple from an early stage, considered their information, and sought input from occupational therapy and the fire service before reaching its decision.
However, the Ombudsman identified fault in the length of time taken to carry out the review and implement the change. Mr and Mrs X were told early in 2022 that their support was likely to be reduced, yet it took around two and a half years for the Council to complete the process and actually change the care, and there was no explanation in the case records for this drift despite national guidance requiring assessments and reviews to be done within a reasonable timescale and for people to be kept informed. The Ombudsman considered it entirely understandable that this prolonged uncertainty and delay caused the couple avoidable distress and frustration, especially as they were clearly very unhappy about the proposal from the outset.
The Council agreed to apologise in writing to each of them and to pay £200 to each as a symbolic payment to acknowledge the distress and frustration caused by the delay; it also agreed, by training or other means, to remind relevant staff of the need to complete reviews within a reasonable timescale and not allow cases to drift.
Points to note for councils, professionals, people using services and their carers, advocacy groups and members of the public
The Ombudsman’s account of the law is broadly consistent with the core duty to meet eligible unmet needs, but community care law places sharper limits on how councils may combine, reduce or re‑frame support where two adults each have substantial, individual 24‑hour needs and live as a household.
Section 25(11) Care Act explicitly states that a plan (and implicitly the budget that is a legal constituent part of that plan) may only be combined if all parties to whom it is relevant agree. It is the responsibility of the local authority to obtain consent from all parties involved, and the combination of plans should aim to maximise outcomes for all involved. Neither the Act nor the guidance states what the consequence is if there is a person who does not agree – but the application of the plain words of the statute is that a person’s right to a personal budget cannot be overridden.
Community care case law and public law principles emphasise that eligibility turns on inability to achieve specified outcomes plus significant impact on wellbeing, and that this analysis must be done separately for each adult before any discussion of sharing care or using a single support arrangement. We are astonished that the investigator does not seem to know about this section of the Act.
The report states that Mr and Mrs X had significant support needs that required 24 hour care, but it does not provide detail about the nature of those needs, or why the professionals consulted thought having a single carer for both of them was defensibly safe. Certainly in our experience the care needs of individuals who receive night time care tend to be high. It would have been useful to have more information about why Mr and Mrs X thought this was unsafe, too.
Public law principles require explicit, evidence‑based consideration of risk to each person’s safety in their home, not just frequency of awakenings, particularly where turning, repositioning or urgent help is needed and where earlier High Court decisions have held that night‑time turning can generate 24‑hour duties when family carers can no longer safely continue.
The focus on how many times they usually woke risks under‑weighting the legal requirement to assess needs over time where they fluctuate, and to build in contingency for foreseeable deteriorations or crises, not just typical nights.
Public law requires councils to distinguish clearly between: assessing needs; deciding whether those needs are eligible; and then deciding how to meet them lawfully, proportionately and in a person‑centred way, taking into account but not being driven by budget considerations. The Ombudsman accepts that the council could look at its overall finances, but community care law underlines that cost can only be one factor between genuinely suitable options; where only one arrangement can reasonably manage the risks to both people at night, cost arguments fall away and a single‑carer solution may not be defensible. That is what it means to be owed a statutory duty that is individually enforceable.
Community care law also reinforces that care and support plans for each adult must specify what is being provided, for which needs and outcomes, and on what assumptions about carers and informal support, so that any reduction is transparently linked back to changes in needs or risk, not simply to a desire to rationalise provision. The Ombudsman’s analysis does not fully test whether the revised single‑carer arrangement was grounded in such robust individual care planning or whether it drifted into treating the couple as a unit whose combined risk could be managed more cheaply, which is precisely the sort of approach that earlier public law cases have criticised.
Please use the following link if you want to read the original Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman’s West Sussex County Council (24 008 913) 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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