Waverley Borough Council has been ordered to pay nearly £13,000 after delays meant a resident was forced to install disability adaptations themselves.
The Housing Ombudsman has found severe maladministration for the local authority after a boy with cerebral palsy was left waiting 18 months for the home to be made more suitable to his needs.
Unreasonable delays and poor communication by Waverley BC meant that the boy’s father was forced to carry out the required works himself, according to the Ombudsman.
Richard Blakeway, Housing Ombudsman, said: ‘Whilst not technically classified as urgent works, clearly they were clearly 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.’
A spokesperson for Waverley BC 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.’
