A LOCAL authority has apologised to the parents of a disabled woman after the councils’ watchdog found it had failed to carry out the remedy for a complaint upheld against it.

North Yorkshire County Council said it fully accepted the findings of the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman and had overhauled its systems following what had been a unique and inadvertent error.

The authority had agreed with the watchdog in June 2018 to undertake a fresh financial assessment for a disabled woman known as Ms X within a month to resolve an ongoing dispute with her parents over transport costs and the Disability Living Allowance.

Councils must assess a person’s finances to decide what contribution he or she should make to a personal budget for care. If a person incurs expenses directly related to any disability he or she has, known as disability related expenditure, the council should take that into account when assessing his or her finances.

A month after agreeing to carry out the assessment of Ms X’s finances the council confirmed to the ombudsman that it had visited Ms X for the task and the ombudsman closed the case.

However, the ombudsman received a complaint from Ms X’s parents some 15 months later to say they still had not received the assessment, despite repeatedly asking the council for it.

Following an investigation, the ombudsman ruled against the council again, finding “fault causing injustice”. The ombudsman said to remedy the injustice caused by the latest fault found, it must apologise to Mr and Mrs X for its failure to complete the assessment of their daughters’ finances for 15 months after the deadline it agreed.

A spokesman for the ombudsman said: “We welcome the council’s offer to pay Mr and Mrs X £250 for their unnecessary time and trouble in pursuing a matter that should have been resolved more than a year earlier.

“The council will make this payment, within a month of the date of this report, independently of any amount owed by either party as a result of the financial settlement or any ongoing complaint about it.”

In addition, as the council was found to have failed to complete a remedy proposed by the ombudsman, the watchdog has published its report into the authority’s mistakes.

Finally, the ombudsman has ruled that the council must consider the report in front of elected members, which it is due to next week, and confirm within three months the action it has taken or proposes to take.

The council said it accepted it did not “appropriately complete the ombudsman’s recommendation” from the earlier complaint, but it had now been completed, with the financial assessment carried out.

The council said it had written to the complainant apologising for the failures and had paid Mr and Mrs X the £250 in recognition of their time and trouble in pursuing this matter.

In addition, working practices within the council’s customer response team have changed since the incident to ensure that all cases are left open until remedies have been completed.

The council said the case was related to events in 2018, and a number of areas of process and practice have been strengthened both before and since the issue was identified by the ombudsman.

Councillor Michael Harrison, the council’s executive member for adult social care, said the authority was supportive of the ombudsman and the failure to complete the remedy had not been a case of the watchdog’s findings being ignored.

He said: “We recognise that we didn’t carry out all the recommendations that the ombudsman made at the time of the first report and have taken steps to do that, and more importantly, have changed our internal processes to make sure it doesn’t happen again. We fully intended to carry out all the recommendations.

“Indeed, the council often goes beyond what the ombudsman recommends and recently we have a track record of putting things right without waiting for the ombudsman.”