Town Hall pays resident £1k after stopping care payments without back-up plan

Hackney Town Hall

Hackney Council has apologised and paid £1,000 in compensation for causing distress to a vulnerable resident after it suspended her social care support payments.

The Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman (LGSCO) said the Town hall had failed to come up with alternative ways to help a resident with eligible care needs, known only as ‘Miss X’, after it stopped paying her sister to provide her personal care.

In 2020, the council had agreed Miss X was entitled to 42 hours of direct payments to fund her access to the community and personal care, but for years these were not fully in place.

Though there had been legitimate issues with her sister, ‘Ms Y’, about how her financial support was being managed, in 2023 the council stopped the direct payments.

As a result, the vulnerable woman was often left alone during the day and isolated from her community, causing her “distress and frustration”.

Ms Y complained to the LGSCO in July 2024, arguing that the council had failed to agree a support plan to meet Miss X’s needs and failed to pay the agreed 42 hours a week of direct payments since 2020.

In what the council described as a “complex” case, the Town Hall had tried repeatedly to engage with Ms Y about how the money it was giving was being spent.

Miss X had asked for her sister to be in charge of this because she did not want non-family members’ help with her personal care.

Care and support regulations state that when a person does not have the mental capacity to request a direct payment from their local authority, an authorised person can do this for them. This then enables people to arrange their own care and support to meet their needs.

In early 2023, the council asked Ms Y to provide annotated bank statements to show how she was spending the money, but she did not provide these, leading to it suspending the payments.

Ms Y later asked the council why it had done so, but not until October 2023.

She later said it was “impractical” to provide annotated bank statements for the last few years, and complained of the impact that the loss of financial support was having on her sister.

The council in 2024 agreed it would resume the payments and reimburse the money to cover the period since the payments were stopped.

It also promised to carry out an “urgent” review of the resident’s care and support needs within four weeks and complete the review within six months, but it failed to do so.

Ombudsman Amerdeep Clarke upheld Ms Y’s complaint and ordered the council to pay £1,000 to recognise its failure to meet her needs since June 2023.

After completing her new support assessment, the council once again identified Miss X’s need to access the community – but the Ombudsman found this need was still not being met.

The watchdog acknowledged that it was not the council’s fault for suspending direct payments, since Ms Y had failed repeatedly to engage with them to resolve the situation.

But it still found the council at fault for not “satisfying itself” over this lingering problem and “allowing the situation to drift”, risking future suspensions.

A Hackney Council spokesperson said it takes its duty to support vulnerable people in the borough “extremely seriously”.

“This is a complex case but we recognise the standards we set for ourselves and that for our residents was not as expected,” they said.

“We fully accept the Ombudsman’s findings and have apologised to the resident for any distress this has caused, alongside carrying out the remaining actions directed by Ombudsman.

“We have used the findings to seek to ensure that we learn from this in the future.”