A mum has won £21,000 after she was forced to carry her disabled child between rooms for over three years because council staff failed to find them a wheelchair-friendly house. Delays in rehousing the family meant the child couldn’t have essential pain-relieving surgery as they had no suitable place to recover, a report from council watchdog the Local Government Ombudsman revealed.
A healthcare professional said that the delays in finding the family a suitable flat meant the child would never be able to stand up again and now needed an entirely different operation. In a damning assessment of the council’s handling of the case, Ombudsman chief executive Nigel Ellis said in a report, which did not name the mother and child, that there was “no evidence” the council tried to find them an alternative suitable house for most of the three years the family lived in the flat.
He said the child and their mother were put at “significant and avoidable risk of harm over a prolonged period” due to the London council’s failures, MyLondon reports.
The Ombudsman report adds: "The family remained in unsuitable accommodation for almost three and a half years. During that time, Ms X [mum] had to meet all Y’s [child] daily living needs without any specialist equipment by carrying and lifting Y."
An occupational therapist first told the council that the family needed moving in April 2019 because the child’s wheelchair couldn’t fit in the property. But it took until October 2022 for the family to move into a suitable wheelchair adapted flat because of a series of delays and mistakes in how the council handled their case.
Lambeth Council failed to reply to the occupational therapist’s first email about the family’s situation in 2019. The therapist was then forced to chase up the family’s case by email five times between July and November the same year, despite telling staff that Y was at risk of choking in the current flat because they couldn’t be positioned properly to eat.
Over the next two years, the council continued to drag its heels, even though the family’s plight was repeatedly raised by the therapist and a social worker in the borough where the family’s unsuitable flat was located.
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In May 2022, the therapist wrote to the council informing them that “the long-term impact of [Y] being unsuitably housed means [they] will have no bones in [their] hips to keep [their] legs in place." The report adds: "This will make it more difficult to support [them] with manual handling and positioning. [Y] will also never be able to be supported in standing.”
The email also said Y’s school had been forced to buy them a specialist bed in which they were wheeled around the building in, because sitting in their wheelchair was causing them too much pain. Lambeth Council staff never replied to this email.
The report also found that Lambeth repeatedly failed to give Ms X the highest priority for rehousing, Band A, despite first considering this in 2019. When Ms X successfully bid on a suitable flat in May 2022, she was still in the lower priority B band.
The Ombudsman said: “In other words, Ms X secured a property no more quickly than she would have had she had no contact with the council at all and continued to bid. This means she and those working with her spent over three years and significant time, trouble, and frustration pursuing the council to no benefit. This is a significant injustice.”
Cllr Donna Harris, leader of the council’s Liberal Democrat opposition, said the scale of the neglect identified in the report was “totally unacceptable.” She said: “Questions need to be answered and assurances must be made that nothing like this ever happens again.”
Lambeth Council apologised and said it would carry out an independent review of its homeless service as recommended by the Ombudsman. A spokesperson said: “We accept the findings of the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman and apologise to the family who were badly let down in this case. The council will undertake the Ombudsman’s recommended actions.”
