A woman who was evicted at short notice from Knoll House, a vacant former council care home in Hove, has been awarded £1,250 compensation after a series of failings.
The Local Government Ombudsman ordered Brighton and Hove City Council to pay £500 to the woman, named only as Ms X in the ombudsman’s report, for poor complaint handling and distress.
The council was ordered to pay another £500 to the woman, a property guardian at the building in Ingram Crescent West, Hove, for the injustice caused by “failing to have regard to her rights”.
It was also ordered to pay a further £250 for the distress caused by failing to provide suitable interim accommodation.
Ms X was one of 21 people left scrambling to find somewhere to live after being given just four hours’ notice to leave on Friday 19 August when Knoll House failed a fire safety inspection.
They were paying a low rent to live in the vacant building as property guardians to protect it from vandalism.
Ms X was placed in interim accommodation but did not hear from the council for weeks after initially speaking to a housing officer.
The housing officer did not complete the section of the form asking whether the applicant required an interpreter. Ms X had asked for one because English is not her first language.
The council had issued her with a personal housing plan (PHP) stating that she was in priority need and would be offered a deposit and rent in advance to find alternative housing.
Repeated requests for a translator at meetings were ignored even though Ms X struggled to understand the technical details.
She received some support from a man referred to as Mr Y in the Ombudsman’s report. He found that her PHP contained errors and no letter accepting a duty to support Ms X.
On two occasions, the council did not respond to Ms X when she found somewhere to live and wanted the financial support that she had been promised.
And the council did not provide support when her interim accommodation was broken into and the police said that she should not stay there.
Ms X was also told to remove her belongings from Knoll House or they would be considered abandoned.
The housing officer in Ms X’s case felt that the interpreter “made the conversation difficult” and “slowed things down unnecessarily”.
The council decided that she was not in priority need but a reviewing officer advised the council to withdraw its decision.
When her complaint was elevated to the next stage, the council did not respond until Mr Y got in touch.
He complained that the council had not told Ms X that it had withdrawn its decision that she was not in priority need.
Ms X sent an email to her housing officer which the council interpreted as her withdrawing her homelessness application.
The ombudsman said that the council’s evidence about the circumstances of Ms X and other guardians leaving Knoll House was “inconsistent” because the residents left voluntarily but the council also referred to officers attending the eviction.
The ombudsman found the council at fault for poor communication, the threat to dispose of her belongings and leaving her to sofa-surf after a break-in as well as failing to address several requests for an interpreter and translations.
The ombudsman said: “Homelessness is a legal process with, as Ms X pointed out, a lot of technical language.
“Homelessness is distressing and Ms X was clearly very upset and finding it difficult to understand her rights and options.
“To tell Ms X that, from its perspective, there was no language barrier was insulting and missed the point.
“The purpose of the interpreter was to help Ms X, not the council. Instead, the council made decisions about her needs and what was useful without consulting her. This is an injustice to Ms X.”
On the council’s complaint handling, the ombudsman said: “It (the council) delayed Ms X’s access to the complaints process and caused avoidable frustration … The council took too long to respond.
“Despite setting out a detailed summary of the complaint in December 2022, the council failed to respond to most of the complaint … This was fault. It caused Ms X and Mr Y avoidable frustration which is an injustice.”
The council said: “We have fully accepted the ombudsman’s ruling, adhered to each of the recommendations and apologised to the resident.
“As an organisation, if we do make mistakes, we make sure we learn from them and will do so in this instance.”
Well who was to blame? Were they the subject of disciplinary action or given further training? What is it about simple administration that Public Bodies find so hard to exercise? Is it that there is a recruitment fault or that they are promoting the wrong people into jobs which they cannot perform? Hard answers are what we deserve and need but don’t expect to get them! Frustrating.
Doesn’t bode well for the hundreds of people in a similar position in the eventual demolition of the various tower blocks, does it?
Hardly. That’s a planned process that is going to take several years to do. This is a guardianship with an immediate need to vacate for fire safety.
They are not the same.
Mates of mates doing the public no favours, and very few of them standing on their own qualifications. It’s about time a standard format was applied to anyone and everyone in charge of anything to do with councils management with follow up training on the go, jobs and work in general,, if you remove. everything that is in the wrong place and the job in hand becomes clearer and simpler to manage, that also applies to people with no relevance to the work in hand. Eirher that or train people properly to a working standard that suits the job,
Am I right in thinking Knoll House has been completely regenerated since this?