To help councils and care providers improve the services they offer to people, we regularly issue guidance notes in the form of our Good Practice Guides.

This month we issued guidance for people working in councils' housing departments aimed at helping them make decisions about applications where people want their medical conditions taken into account.

Very often these people will have to undergo a medical assessment, and in these cases we offer advice to council officers about how to consider these assessments in conjunction with all the other evidence they take into account.

Based on lessons from previous complaints, one of the key learning points highlighted in the guide is for councils to properly evidence that they have made their own decisions on medical needs and not automatically accepted the views of independent medical advisers.

Other learning for councils includes ensuring they consider all the evidence when making decisions, and addressing all the issues raised, as well as not delaying carrying out medical assessments or reviews.

The free guide, which can be downloaded from the our website, also includes information about how we investigate complaints and the remedies we may recommend where we find fault.

Read more

In the past month, we have responded to the Department for Education's (DfE) latest consultation on their New National Standards and a quality assurance framework for unregistered alternative provision.

Alternative provision is education offered to children who cannot go to school for whatever reason.

Drawing on the experience gained from our casework, we can offer valuable insight when responding to these consultations.

In this area, our casework regularly finds:

• significant delays in councils putting alternative provision in place,
• children being kept on alternative provision for far too long with no plan for reintegration back into school (or because of delays in identifying and meeting special educational needs),
• lack of reviews to check the provision is meeting the child’s needs, and
• alternative provision often not being full time. 

The consultation is the latest on this topic from the DfE that we have responded to.

Read more

We clarified with Royal Borough of Kingston its approach to fly-tipping in its parks after a resident made a complaint about a dumped mattress.

The resident told the council that the mattress had been fly-tipped in a river in a council-run park and asked that it be removed.

But instead of sending a crew to remove the single mattress, the council argued it was not its responsibility and suggested the resident contact the Environment Agency instead.

When we looked into the case, we decided, based on government guidance, it was the council’s duty to remove the waste, as it was in ‘water on council land’.

The council has since removed the mattress.

Read more

If you've spent time at your local park over the summer, and you have a complaint about how your council is looking after it, like the man in the above story, you may be able to complain to us.

We have a raft of factsheets on our website covering the diverse range of complaints we can investigate.

We have one specifically for complaints about parks, gardens, playing fields and sportsgrounds, giving advice on how to complain and a couple of example complaints we have already investigated.

Read more