Watchdog raps Walsall Council over complaints
Delays in tackling vermin issues and a failure to respond to a family’s concerns about the care being given to their relative are among the reasons Walsall Council was reprimanded by watchdogs.
The Local Government Ombudsman upheld a total of six complaints made against the authority in 2018/19 and ordered Walsall Council to carry out remedial action.
An annual report on the ombudsman’s findings were presented to the authority’s standards committee at a meeting on Monday.
The report showed that a total of 52 complaints about Walsall Council were received by the Ombudsman last financial year – 20 fewer than in 2017/18.
During that time, the Ombudsman decided or determined 47 cases, with six of those in favour of residents.
Five were thrown out, 18 closed after initial enquiries, 14 referred back for local resolution and four incomplete or invalid.
In one case in 2017, a man started experiencing problems with mice in his cavity wall and contacted the council about vermin and the overgrown neighbouring garden.
Officers could not access the neighbouring property to carry out an inspection. But despite suspecting there was a problem with vermin in October that year, the authority did not start pursuing legal action until July 2018.
The ombudsman found that had the authority acted without delay, the complainant’s problems would have been resolved eight months earlier than they were.
Walsall Council was ordered to apologise to the man, pay him £500 and complete a "lessons learned" review of what went wrong.
In another case, a man had raised concerns about the quality of care provided to his late mother-in-law at a residential care home in the borough.
The ombudsman said the authority failed to respond to the claimants reports of poor quality care and failed to review the care she had received while living in the home.
And, while the council acknowledged its failings, the Ombudsman was critical of it for not offering a remedy.
The authority was ordered to provide a full written apology, waive 50 per cent of the invoice for outstanding care contributions, waive the full amount of a third-party top-up fee owed to the care provider, pay £500 to the complainant for distress caused and carry out reviews into its service.
But the report did also acknowledge that where the Ombudsman had set out remedial action for Walsall Council to carry out, it had fully complied within 12 months.
