Council fined over failing tenant with depression

The council tenant raised several complaints about anti-social behaviour over a five-month period but was largely ignored by the authority, a Housing Ombudsman Service (HOS) probe found.

This was despite the resident telling the landlord years before that he suffers from heightened anxiety, insomnia, panic attacks and is dyslexic.

The tenant was forced to remind the council of his complex mental health issues six times over five months, said HOS.

And the probe found that on only two occasions did the council, which has admitted fault, take any action.

The first was to signpost the tenant to Victim Support three months after the initial complaint, before then referring him to other support agencies two months later.

It was only when the tenant contacted NHS’s 24/7 urgent mental health helpline that referrals were made to the appropriate safeguarding services.

HOS found the council also failed to respond to the resident’s query about Reasonable Adjustments, and even when requested to provide evidence around this for the Ombudsman, only presented its Housing Allocations policy rather than its own Reasonable Adjustments policy.

Housing Ombudsman Richard Blakeway said council bosses did not act fast enough or consider how the anti-social behaviour case would impact the vulnerable resident’s health.

Sandwell Council was ordered to review its Reasonable Adjustments policy over failing to act appropriately under the Equality Act 2010.

Mr Blakeway said: “It is clear the council could have offered the resident additional support and that it missed multiple opportunities to do so, including referring him to relevant services at a much earlier point.

"This represents a significant failure by the landlord which resulted in unnecessary upset to the resident and an understandable feeling that the landlord was not taking his concerns seriously.

“Having a Reasonable Adjustments policy in place and making it both accessible to residents whilst also having staff adequately trained on its use, is vital as social housing grapples with the complexity of the cases they’re dealing with.”

The Ombudsman ordered the council to apologise to the tenant, pay £1,000 in compensation and ensure it does not happen again.

A Sandwell Council spokesperson said: “We fully accept the findings of the Ombudsman in this case and have apologised for those failures to our tenant.

“We have also learnt some important lessons from the Ombudsman’s findings that will ensure future ASB investigations assess and address the individual needs of the complainant and subject of complaints.

"This case highlighted the absence of a clear reasonable adjustment policy for our investigating officers to follow.

“This policy is now in place with training plans in development to embed its principles.

"We accept our communication in this case didn’t meet our normal expectations or standards and we continue to work hard to ensure our case management principles, which place emphasis on the importance of good communication, are complied with in each and every case.

"Refresher training on complaint investigation has also been rolled out and a wider review of our complaint handling processes is already underway.”