Date of decision: 06 February 2026
Summary
An adult woman with autism and mental health issues and an assessed need for 18 hours per week of community-based support was left without that input for around six months, leaving her isolated at home and wholly reliant on her parents for care. The Council repeatedly pressed her mother to take direct payments, despite clear refusals, instead of securing commissioned support that actually met the woman’s eligible needs and provided the parents with respite from their caring role.
What happened
Ms Y, an adult woman living with her parents Mr and Mrs X, is autistic and has mental health issues that significantly affect her daily life and her ability to use her home, maintain a habitable environment, access community facilities and engage in work, education, training or volunteering.
In 2024, the Council carried out a Care Act needs assessment and decided she required 18 hours of support per week focused on accessing the community and starting to socialise with people beyond her family, with Mr and Mrs X willingly providing substantial informal care to keep her safe and maintain the home.
To meet these needs, the Council tendered for support and, following the tender, accepted a bid from care provider A, which began providing support to Ms Y from July 2024. By early October 2024, provider A gave notice to the Council, saying Ms Y and Mrs X were unhappy with the care workers being offered, and the arrangement ended.
In October 2024 the Council arranged a new package with care provider B. During November 2024 and January 2025, Mr and Mrs X raised concerns, including that a care worker had twice fallen asleep while supposedly supporting Ms Y, and they asked for a meeting about these issues. Provider B then withdrew in January 2025, telling the Council that Ms Y was refusing to engage with new workers, and at that point the Council asked Mrs X if she would consider using direct payments instead. Mrs X refused, explaining she did not want to become an employer and doubted she could find a personal assistant where even Council-commissioned providers were hard to secure.
The Council next identified care provider C and told Mrs X they would contact her the following week, but no call came. Mrs X requested emergency support, and the Council again suggested direct payments, which she again refused, repeating that if the Council could not find a provider, she was unlikely to find one herself. She then complained to the Council about provider C’s failure to contact her and the lack of support to meet Ms Y’s assessed needs. In late January 2025, provider C finally assessed Ms Y, but Mrs X and the provider agreed that it could not in fact meet Ms Y’s needs, so no service was put in place.
In early February 2025, Mrs X contacted the Council for an update. The Council proposed an enablement-type service with targeted goals to maximise independence, but Mrs X pointed out that Ms Y had already completed six months of reablement the previous year. The Council then suggested either two days a week at a respite centre or, again, direct payments. Mrs X asked for further information about the respite centre and again refused direct payments; the Council explained that the centre was operated by provider B, and Mrs X arranged a visit. The visit was cancelled and the respite centre subsequently decided it could not meet Ms Y’s needs either, leaving her still without any package.
In late February 2025 the Council issued its response to Mrs X’s complaint. It accepted that provider C had initially failed to contact her and said that when this was identified, the social worker had chased the provider, which then telephoned and apologised. The Council acknowledged that no care was in place but maintained that many options had been “explored and offered”, and it urged Mrs X to remain open to all options including direct payments, offering for an officer to contact her to go through that route in more detail, and saying it would continue working with the local care market to find provision for residents. Around the same time, it also suggested supported accommodation for Ms Y, which she did not want, leaving Mrs X unhappy that the only concrete options being pressed were supported accommodation and direct payments while no actual support was in place.
In mid-March 2025 the Council updated Mrs X that it was still searching for a provider and had circulated a summary of Ms Y’s needs to day care providers but had received no positive responses. In late May 2025 the Council wrote to say it was then in contact with care provider D and indicated that if it could not secure a provider it would want Mrs X to reconsider direct payments. Eventually, in late June 2025, provider D began supporting Ms Y, ending the period during which no commissioned support had been in place.
What was found
The Ombudsman found that after the breakdowns of the packages with providers A and B and the failure to secure a viable arrangement with provider C, the Council left Ms Y with no commissioned support between January and June 2025 despite her assessed need for 18 hours per week of community access support, which was a fault under its duties in the Care Act to meet eligible needs.
This failure meant Ms Y’s need for support to access the community beyond her family was unmet for several months, and it placed her parents under significant extra strain, without respite, as they had to continue providing all support themselves during that period.
The Ombudsman accepted that the Council was entitled to mention direct payments as one legal way to administer a personal budget, but criticised the way it persistently pushed this option after Mrs X had clearly and repeatedly declined to consider it, finding that this repeated suggestion constituted further fault which caused Mrs X additional frustration.
There was, however, no requirement in the agreed action for service changes or staff training, and the remedy in this report focused on acknowledgement and financial redress rather than learning requirements. The Council agreed to apologise to Ms Y and pay her £300 for the missed support for community activities, and to apologise to Mrs X and pay her £300 for the frustration and lack of respite resulting from its failures.
Points to note for councils, professionals, people using services and their carers, advocacy groups and members of the public
The Council’s duty to meet eligible needs arose once it had assessed Ms Y and decided she needed 18 hours a week of community-based support, and that duty was not suspended simply because providers A, B and C withdrew or were unsuitable or were unable to deliver; leaving her with no commissioned support for around six months reflected a deeper failure to apply the statutory duty to meet needs, rather than a simple commissioning difficulty.
Community care law emphasises that once eligible unmet needs are identified, the authority must either commission, provide, or otherwise secure provision that is objectively sufficient to reduce the impact on wellbeing to something less than significant; here the repeated references to searching the market and suggesting alternatives, without interim provision or use of urgent powers, underplays the authority’s duty to act even where the market is thin. It has been the law since 1996 and the Lancashire case allowed for comparison of the cost of alternative adequate solutions, that if there is only one appropriate way to meet the need, then the cost of it is irrelevant; it has also been the law since the Rixon case that an interim package must be found to meet the need even if it is not wholly ideal.
Public law principles stress that authorities cannot lawfully fall back on market failure as a justification for leaving needs unmet where they retain powers to commission creatively, fund interim support or adjust the personal budget to a rate that will actually secure provision, yet the Ombudsman’s reasoning treats the gap in provision mainly as a failure in outcome rather than probing the sufficiency and rationality of the Council’s approach to commissioning and the setting of that budget.
In similar community care cases (including those involving sufficiency of home‑care rates and packages dependent on specialist support) the courts have been clear that a personal budget must be sufficient to secure services in the real local market and that “we cannot find a provider” is not, on its own, an answer to an absolute duty to meet needs; it should have been possible to analyse whether Reading’s budget offers, tender specifications and escalation routes met that standard.
The Ombudsman rightly criticises the repeated promotion of direct payments after Mrs X had clearly explained that she did not wish to become an employer and doubted she could find staff where the Council itself was struggling, but the analysis does not fully engage with public law principles that prohibit authorities from using direct payments as a de facto condition of meeting needs or as a way of shifting commissioning risk onto families. That is what the requirement for a request from a capacitated person him or herself as the service user is about, in section 31.
Community care law principles preclude the use of direct payments to circumvent the duty to commission at market‑realistic rates; an explicit finding that such pressure risks amounting to an unlawful fetter on the choice of method of delivery would have been consistent with that analysis.
There is evidence that Mr and Mrs X were providing substantial ongoing care to keep Ms Y safe and maintain the home, and that the absence of commissioned support left them without any respite, yet the Ombudsman does not examine whether the Council ought to have considered carers’ support rights in tandem with Ms Y’s own care planning. Community care law and public law principles on carers’ rights emphasise that informal care can only be treated as meeting needs where the carer is both willing and able, and that authorities must not assume that relatives will carry on indefinitely when doing so has a significant impact on their health and wellbeing; in this case, the description of “significant extra strain” yet no exploration of support for the parents suggests a missed opportunity to analyse whether the Council had, in effect, relied unlawfully on their continuing care without checking willingness and ability or offering carer‑focused support. This was a report tailor-made for a formal finding of restitution of the value of the hours that the Council had allocated in the care plan, the £300 from the Investigator, wholly misses the LGSCO’s own obligation to follow the law set out in CP v North East Lincs case in 2019 in the Court of Appeal. The cause of action in terms of legal proceedings is also called unjust enrichment because a council that breaches its duty to provide is saving money that it should not be saving (however desperate it might be for money to spend on other people). A more robust approach here could have signalled that failing to use urgent powers and creative commissioning where parents are effectively propping up the system will not be treated as a matter for apology alone.
A further legal issue concerns the Council’s proposal of an enablement‑type service and repeated references to reablement and supported accommodation after the authority had already made an eligibility decision and quantified Ms Y’s ongoing needs for 18 hours a week of community support. Community care case law and guidance on the boundary between prevention and meeting need distinguish between time‑limited interventions aimed at reducing or delaying needs and the positive duty to meet current eligible unmet needs; by placing weight on reablement‑style offers and a change of setting when there was no suggestion that Ms Y’s needs had reduced, the Ombudsman could have explored more critically whether the Council was sliding back into prevention in place of an honest reassessment and lawful care planning under the duty to meet needs, especially where Ms Y did not want supported accommodation.
Please use the following link if you want to read the original Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman’s Reading Borough Council (25 001 921) 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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