ate of decision: 25 November 2025
Summary
A woman complained that the Council stopped funding her disabled adult daughter’s place at a local youth theatre programme that was central to her development and social life. She said the Council’s delay in reviewing support and its refusal to reinstate funding left her daughter distressed and forced the family to self-fund a critically important service.
What happened
In December 2023, the Council ended funding for a disabled adult’s attendance at a local youth theatre programme that formed part of her community and developmental activities. Her mother complained to the Council, arguing that losing this theatre provision would harm her daughter’s developmental outcomes, and she asked for the funding to be reinstated. The Council refused to reinstate the funding, stating that the daughter’s new placement would help her to meet the same outcomes previously supported by the theatre provision.
In January 2024, the Council told the mother it would review the daughter’s support in March 2024 and, if the loss of theatre provision had significantly affected her wellbeing, it would reconsider its funding decision. The daughter’s social worker then became unavoidably absent from work for a prolonged period, and the review did not happen in March. After the social worker returned, in July 2024, the Council carried out a Care Act 2014 reassessment and reviewed the daughter’s needs and existing support.
In the resulting care plan, under the outcome “being part of my community, family and social network”, the Council recorded that the daughter continued to attend the theatre provision twice a week, but now funded privately rather than by the Council. The plan also set out various other ways in which that community and social outcome would be met, none of which relied on the Council funding the theatre provision. The Council decided not to overturn its earlier decision to cease funding the theatre provision, saying instead that the daughter’s placement provider (supported living) would need “to look at other avenues for [her] to explore and gain new skills”.
The Council noted that the daughter’s placement had offered to reduce her one-to-one hours so that money could be redirected to pay for the theatre provision, but it decided this would not be appropriate. It considered that she needed all her one-to-one support and might already be receiving more support from the placement provider, on a goodwill basis, than the Council was formally funding. The Council asked the theatre group provider if it could part-fund the daughter’s place, but the provider replied that it could not because of a lack of other funding.
In October 2024, the Council emailed the mother with options it considered available to the daughter. These were for her to attend the theatre provision only half the time so she could afford to self-fund; to take up voluntary opportunities at another local theatre; and to have her benefits reviewed to ensure she was receiving all entitlements. The mother rejected these alternatives, saying that halving the theatre attendance would mean her daughter constantly trying to catch up on missed material, that voluntary opportunities should be an addition rather than a replacement, that her daughter’s benefits were already up to date, and that she wanted a meeting with the social worker’s manager.
In January 2025, the Council met with the mother to discuss the situation but maintained its position that the daughter’s eligible needs could be met through her existing placement rather than through Council-funded attendance at the theatre provision. The mother then complained to the Ombudsman, saying the delay in review, failure to reinstate funding, and reliance on unsuitable alternatives had caused her daughter distress and left the mother paying for what she saw as a service critical to her daughter’s life.
What was found
The Ombudsman found the Council at fault for failing to carry out the promised review of the daughter’s support in March 2024, despite assuring the mother that it would reconsider the theatre funding at that time. The social worker’s absence did not remove the Council’s duty to honour its commitment to review, and there was no good reason why another officer could not have ensured the review happened. This delay caused the mother injustice in the form of avoidable uncertainty as she waited months longer than promised for a decision, although it was unlikely the delay itself caused significant additional injustice to the daughter because the later review did not change the funding outcome.
On the substantive funding issue, the Ombudsman did not find fault in how the Council made its decision about not reinstating funding for the theatre provision. The Council considered information from the mother, the daughter’s placement company and the theatre provider, recognised that the daughter continued to attend the theatre provision, and decided—on professional grounds—that her eligible outcome of being part of her community, family and social network could be met by other support and opportunities. The Ombudsman noted that the Council also considered and rejected the proposal to reduce one-to-one hours to create funding for the theatre, on the basis of a professional view that this would not be in the daughter’s interests, and that this was within its lawful discretion.
Because there was no significant or obvious procedural fault in the way the Council considered the evidence and reached its decision on funding, the Ombudsman had no power to question the professional judgment itself, even though the theatre provision was clearly of great importance to the daughter and highly valued by the mother and the placement providers. The Ombudsman therefore concluded that the only fault was the delay in the promised review, which the Council agreed to remedy by issuing an apology to the mother within four weeks and providing evidence that this apology letter had been sent.
Points to note for councils, professionals, people using services and their carers, advocacy groups and members of the public
The Ombudsman treats the Care Act duty to meet eligible needs as compatible with a wide margin of discretion over “how” those needs are met, provided the records show a rational link between the assessment, the eligible outcomes and the chosen configuration of services. It was a central plank of the Care Act that needs would not necessarily be met by the Council just because they were eligible needs; if they could be met to a reasonable standard through assets and strengths, then that was good enough. That was not actually new, in fact; under the old law, the concept was whether the needs necessitated provision by the Council – ie was there any other means by which they could be met? But that is not often well understood by those in practice now.
We take the view that people are always welcome to self-fund the meeting of their own needs, and if there is an overlap as between those needs and the needs that are eligible, then the cost of engaging in that route for meeting them is Disability Related Expenditure. If the need is disability related, and reasonably priced, it need not be an eligible need in order to attract a disregard from needs, in fact. However, if one is struggling to meet the need for oneself, potentially in debt to other creditors, but desperate to continue the activity, that is not voluntary self funding, and neither is a parent’s gifting you the money, either! That’s the outcome of a stance by the Council of this nature: we CAN say no, so let’s do so and wait to see if anyone brings judicial review proceedings (such as happened to Windsor & Maidenhead, when it refused to treat a person’s activities as in the Plan and to be funded, OR DRE, and was soundly found to be in the wrong!).
It is important to note that under the Mental Capacity Act, money for necessaries extended to a person lacking in capacity can be treated as a loan to the person in need, and if the mother was her appointee, she could have taken it back and shown the Council that it was not the decision-maker about the daughter’s own money.
Any asset or strength able to be pointed to by a Council must, in our view, be discussed and found on a professional basis to be objectively suitable, accessible, available if a vacancy is involved, and at a cost the person no more than they would be charged through the charging system, before a council can safely say, ‘No, that other thing that you prefer is your own choice’.
No specific mention of looking for evidence that the Council staff considered the wellbeing promotion duty is made by the Investigator, which we find concerning. The Ombudsman says this, and the obvious place to mention being satisfied that the Council did consider wellbeing (in the same way that Investigators regularly look for any evidence that regard has been paid to the need for reasonable adjustments, or that consideration has been given to human rights) was here:
- Given the prominence that the theatre provision has in Miss X’s life, and given the excellent reviews of the provision I have seen from Mrs Y and from Miss X’s placement, I understand why Mrs Y is so determined that Miss X continue her attendance.
- However, for the reasons I have given above, there was no significant or obvious procedural fault in how the Council has considered this matter.
In this case, the focus is almost entirely on whether the youth theatre can lawfully be “swapped out” because the same outcome label is ticked off elsewhere, rather than on the intensity, quality and specificity of what the theatre actually contributed to that outcome.
Public law places weight on the need for transparent, evidence-based reasoning about sufficiency of support, especially where a previously funded service with obvious benefits is withdrawn. The Ombudsman accepts the council’s view that other activities within the placement can meet the “being part of my community, family and social network” outcome, but there is no exploration of whether those alternatives are of comparable value in terms of emotional wellbeing, identity, confidence and continuity, which community care case law treats as inherent in the wellbeing duty and in lawful care planning. The risk is that relabelling generic activities as “community inclusion” can be treated as enough, even where the lived experience and developmental gains from a specific setting like the theatre or other daytime activity with different people to the ones with whom one lives, are materially different.
Community care law also underlines that once eligible needs are identified, the duty is to meet those needs, not to fund particular services, but the authority must avoid treating cost or resource management as the hidden driver of its choices. In this decision, the Ombudsman notes the council’s consideration of the offer of reducing one-to-one support and of asking the provider to contribute, yet does not scrutinise whether the refusal to fund the theatre was in practice driven by commissioning assumptions about what the block-funded placement “ought” to cover, rather than by a fresh, open-minded appraisal of the daughter’s individual needs. That sits uneasily with public law warnings against fettering discretion through inflexible service models or panel expectations, especially where a long-standing, person-specific provision is at stake.
From a public law perspective, the handling of the promised March 2024 review is treated as a narrow delay problem, addressed by a simple apology. Community care law places more emphasis on the immediacy of the section 18 duty once eligible needs are accepted, and on the requirement to avoid leaving people in limbo when there is a dispute or planned reconsideration of a vital element of their package. In similar contexts, the courts have criticised authorities for failing to use their review and reassessment powers promptly where carers are strained, or key elements of a plan are in flux, and for failing to treat delay itself as a substantive risk to wellbeing and family stability, not just as a source of “uncertainty”.
The Ombudsman records that the mother rejected suggestions such as halving attendance or substituting unpaid volunteering, but does not test whether those options were realistically capable of meeting her daughter’s needs. The mother was a best interest consultee in relation to what should be done for the woman during the times when the theatre group would have involved transporting her outside of the placement. Her disagreement may have legitimately signalled that the proposed option failed to meet need, not just as a preference the authority can note and move past.
Seen through the lens of public law and community care case law on care planning, this decision illustrates how a narrow focus on process defects, and a reluctance to interrogate substance, can leave unchallenged broader questions about sufficiency, wellbeing and the real impact of removing a distinctive community resource from a disabled adult’s life.
The action point for families and advocates is to frame challenges in terms of whether specific eligible needs and wellbeing impacts are truly being met, and to press for written reasons that show how professional discretion has been exercised within the limits set by public law and community care law.
Please use the following link if you want to read the original Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman’s Derby City Council (24 017 648) 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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