The Ombudsman's final decision
Summary: We will not investigate this complaint about the Council’s handling of Ms X’s Community Trigger request. This is because we are unlikely to find evidence of fault by the Council sufficient to warrant an investigation.
The complaint
The complainant, who I refer to as Ms X, complains about the Council’s handling of her request for a Community Trigger review to look into her claims of anti-social behaviour affecting her.
The Ombudsman’s role and powers
We investigate complaints about ‘maladministration’ and ‘service failure’, which we call ‘fault’. We must also consider whether any fault has had an adverse impact on the person making the complaint, which we call ‘injustice’. We provide a free service but must use public money carefully. We do not start or may decide not to continue with an investigation if we decide: there is not enough evidence of fault to justify investigating, or any fault has not caused injustice to the person who complained, or any injustice is not significant enough to justify our involvement, or we could not add to any previous investigation by the organisation, or further investigation would not lead to a different outcome, or we cannot achieve the outcome someone wants, or there is another body better placed to consider this complaint. (Local Government Act 1974, section 24A(6)) We cannot investigate late complaints unless we decide there are good reasons. Late complaints are when someone takes more than 12 months to complain to us about something a council has done. (Local Government Act 1974, sections 26B and 34D, as amended)
How I considered this complaint
I considered information provided by Ms X and the Council, including its letters to her dated 7 July 2022 and 11 November 2022.
I considered the Ombudsman’s Assessment Code.
My assessment
Ms X contacted the Council to request a review of the handling of her anti-social behaviour case by means of the Community Trigger process.
In accordance with normal procedures, the Council consulted with the police and Ms X’s housing association. However, they found that the threshold for the Community Trigger had not been met. The Council wrote to Ms X on 7 July 2022 to explain why this was the case.
Ms X complained to the Council that a police report she had made about a housing association employee harassing her had not been included under the police disclosure summary for the Community Trigger process. The Council responded to Ms X. In its letter to her of 11 November 2022 it explained that the report had been made to the police but that as there was no evidence to support the claims the case was closed with no further action and as such it was not necessary to consider the report as part of the Community Trigger process.
While Ms X may be disappointed with the outcome of the Community Trigger process, an investigation by the Ombudsman is unlikely to find evidence of fault by the Council sufficient to warrant an investigation.
We do not investigate every complaint we receive and while there was a delay in Ms X receiving the Council’s response to her complaint in November 2022, we will not investigate complaint handling when we are not investigating the substantive issue.
The Local Government Act 1974 sets out our powers but also imposes restrictions on what we can investigate. The restriction highlighted at paragraph 3 applies to past events that Ms X has referred to and which took place outside the 12-month time limit as we would reasonably have expected a complaint to have been made to us sooner.
The police and Ms X’s housing association are bodies which do not fall within our jurisdiction so we cannot consider complaints made against them.
Final decision
We will not investigate Ms X’s complaint because we are unlikely to find evidence of fault sufficient to warrant an investigation.
Investigator's decision on behalf of the Ombudsman