Council to pay nearly £13k after delayed disability adaptations forced resident to install his own

Waverley Borough Council has been told to pay nearly £13,000 after a Housing Ombudsman investigation found the council’s “unreasonable delays” in providing disability adaptations forced a resident to install his own.

The resident behind the complaint, who has a son with cerebral palsy, was waiting 18 months for the home to be suitable for their needs.

The Ombudsman began the report by acknowledging that the adaptations “are important to the dignity and quality of life of the resident’s son and family”.

The Ombudsman found that “whilst there were some factors outside of the landlord’s control, such as the Covid-19 pandemic, there were still unreasonable delays and poor communication throughout”.

According to the report, after the resident confirmed he wished to proceed with the adaptations, it took the landlord five months to confirm there was a need for specialist contractors and a further six months for the quotes to be obtained.

When the quotes were compiled, it was discovered that the cost of the works would be more than allowed in the landlord’s policy. Therefore, it needed to explore other options first.

However, it then took a further two months for the landlord to undertake a site visit to assess having the work done by its own contractors, and then another two months until it placed an order for the adaptations, said the Ombudsman.

It was then a further three months that the landlord made a provisional booking for the works to take place.

“By this point 18 months had passed since the original indication from the resident that he wished to progress the adaptations, at which point he told the landlord he would undertake the work himself”, the Ombudsman revealed.

The Ombudsman’s investigation found “several instances” where the landlord failed to respond to resident communications, including when he told it he was progressing the works himself.

To remedy the injustice caused, the Ombudsman told the landlord pay the resident £11,200 as reimbursement for the adaptation works he undertook, adding: “the landlord is entitled to apply this against the arrears that have accumulated on the resident’s rental account which are directly due to this dispute”.

Additionally, the Ombudsman told the landlord to pay £1,500 to acknowledge the distress and inconvenience caused.

On top of the compensation, the Ombudsman recommended the landlord undertake a “thorough review” of its approach to disabled adaptations.

Richard Blakeway, Housing Ombudsman, said: “Whilst not technically classified as urgent works, clearly they were immensely important to the family and should not have been unreasonably delayed to the extent that they were.

“These delays were compounded by the resident then sometimes being ignored. This was unacceptable during a period of time that the resident was trying to get vital adaptations for his son completed.

“I welcome the learning the landlord has taken from this case and urge other landlords to look at this case for lessons on how to deal with disability adaptations and the sensitivities in doing so.”

In a learning statement, Waverley Borough Council said: “We would like to offer our sincere apologies for the poor service received by our resident and his son. 

“Waverley Borough Council accepts that there were unreasonable delays in dealing with an application made by one of our residents for adaptations to meet the needs of his disabled son, and that our communication with our resident could have been improved.

“The Council has learned valuable lessons from this case, and as requested by the Ombudsman, we are in the process of carrying out a comprehensive review of our policies and procedures around processing requests from our residents for disabled aids and adaptations to establish why, on this occasion, we did not meet our usual standards and to identify and make improvements to prevent errors occurring in the future. 

“As part of this review, we are conducting interviews with residents to gather feedback on our policy and we will be reporting our final recommendations to Waverley’s Landlord Services Board in September 2023.” 

Lottie Winson