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Brent Council was made to pay £1,400 compensation after an investigation found the delay caused her a “significant injustice”.
The council “took no action” to prevent the heavily pregnant woman from being made homeless until January of this year, despite her making a homelessness application in June of 2022, according to a report by the Local Government Ombudsman (LGO).
The woman, referred to in the report as Mrs B, told the council she was expecting a child and had been asked to leave the house of the friend she had been staying with.
She accused the council of poor communication and of wrongly closing her case, leaving her with no fixed address and having to crash on friends’ sofas.
If a council has “reason to believe” someone is threatened with homelessness, it is required to take a homelessness application and, if they have a priority need such as being pregnant, they must be given interim accommodation.
However, in August 2022, Mrs B complained that the council closed her case without telling her after she failed to send over every piece of documentation it requested for her assessment.
The council accepted that this was done without proper warning so reopened her application and awarded her £250 compensation. Mrs B was not satisfied with this and escalated the complaint.
The ombudsman report states that the council “cannot summarily close an application if an applicant is engaging but has not provided all the documents it asked for” and, from the documentation that was provided, it should have been able to decide that Mrs B was “eligible for assistance, unintentionally homeless and in priority need”.
Investigators also found that this was not an isolated incident as the council had wrongly closed another complainant’s application twice last year, prematurely and without telling them.
Mrs B’s midwife then asked the council to find a home for her urgently because her February due date…
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