Council to pay homeless man £750 after failings

A council has been ordered to pay £750 to a homeless man and told to make service improvements after it failed to provide him with emergency accommodation for a second time.

West Northamptonshire Council apologised for refusing the man's homelessness request and for any distress caused.

The individual, referred to as Mr X, had also complained that the Conservative-controlled authority repeated failures from a previous incident in 2023, when he was forced to sleep in his car for a fortnight after he said his mother had assaulted him.

The Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman (LGSCO) said the council had "further compounded" the stress the man was under.

According to the Local Democracy Reporting Service, the man had again approached the authority for homelessness assistance in August 2024 after he was forced to return to the same place where he had experienced domestic abuse.

He told West Northamptonshire Council he had returned to sleeping in his car and had tried to take his life several times.

In response, the council recommended he contact his landlord to ask to move into his tenancy, which was due to start in September, early.

It said it recognised he was temporarily homeless, but that Mr X did not meet the priority need criteria for temporary accommodation.

The LGSCO report said: "The ombudsman has already found significant fault with this council for its handling of Mr X's case when he previously fled domestic abuse."

It said the council "should have considered his approach as a homelessness application, not a request for advice" and "the council's actions amount to a fault".

The investigator added that the council's actions and improvements promised after the 2023 incident had not addressed "the underlying issue" of failing to properly identify and assess homelessness applications.

The watchdog asked the council to provide evidence that it has given its staff further training, told it to circulate the investigation and apologised to the individual for their faults.

West Northamptonshire Council said it was "committed to learning from this [case]" and had "begun taking steps to implement the ombudsman's proposed actions, including further training to our housing and homelessness teams".

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