Die Bürgerbeauftragte für soziale Angelegenheiten Samiah El Samadoni begrüßt die Ausweitung des Unterhaltsvorschusses bis zum 18. Geburtstag und den Wegfall der Höchstbezugsdauer: „ Es wurde höchste Zeit, dass die bisherigen Beschränkungen abgeschafft werden. Denn für alle Kinder und Jugendlichen, egal welchen Alters, muss der Unterhalt sichergestellt werden, sonst kommt es zu finanziellen Notlagen. Gerade den Alleinerziehenden ist eine zusätzliche Belastung nicht zuzumuten“.

Anspruchsberechtigt nach dem Unterhaltsvorschussgesetz (UVG) sind Kinder eines alleinerziehenden Elternteils, deren anderer Elternteil keinen oder einen nicht ausreichenden Unterhaltsbetrag leistet. Ab 1. Juli 2017 fällt die Höchstbezugsgrenze von 72 Monaten und die Leistungen werden nun über das 12. Lebensjahr hinaus bis zur Volljährigkeit des Kindes gewährt. Für Kinder nach Vollendung des 12. Lebensjahres ist zusätzlich Voraussetzung, dass sie nicht selbst auf Leistungen des Jobcenters angewiesen sind oder dass der alleinerziehende Elternteil Erwerbseinkommen in Höhe von mindestens 600 Euro brutto monatlich erzielt.

Die Höhe des Unterhaltsvorschusses richtet sich nach dem Alter der Kinder und beträgt aktuell für Kinder von 0 bis 5 Jahren 150 Euro, für Kinder von 6 bis 11 Jahren 201 Euro und für Kinder von 12 bis 17 Jahren 268 Euro monatlich.

Die Bürgerbeauftragte rät allen Betroffenen, umgehend einen Antrag bei der Unterhaltsvorschussstelle – in der der Regel beim zuständigen Jugendamt – des Kreises oder der kreisfreien Stadt zu stellen.

Responding to today's Care Quality Commission report, The State of Mental Health services 2014 to 2017, the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman, Michael King said:

“I welcome the Care Quality Commission’s report into the state of mental health care services. We issued our own report yesterday into Mental Capacity Assessments and Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards, which are used by care providers to assess people’s ability to make decisions for themselves when in a care setting or hospital. In that report, we said any measures put in place to protect people from harm should be the least restrictive possible.

“In the last year, up to one in five of all complaints we received about adult social care had an element of Mental Capacity Assessment or Deprivation of Liberty Safeguarding within them. And of those we investigated in more detail, we upheld 69% - higher than our 53% average.

“People should be treated fairly and they should have the right to make choices for themselves unless they have been formally assessed as not having capacity.”

A grandmother who was ‘stretched beyond maximum capacity’ after Croydon Children’s Services left her to look after her disabled grandson for two years without any respite, has had her complaints upheld by the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman.

The woman had been struggling to care for her grandson, who has Autism and Fragile X Syndrome, on her own since her daughter died unexpectedly in 2004. The grandson is now 19.

The boy’s conditions mean he struggles to cope with changes to his routine. He has significant behavioural issues when his routines are altered, so any changes need to be carefully managed.

The grandmother contacted the London Borough of Croydon in 2011 to ask for support with respite care as she was struggling to manage his behaviour as he grew older and stronger.

In May 2012 the council awarded her a package of respite which provided flexible use of three days a month and a seven day holiday break taken at his specialist school’s residential facility.  The council also agreed to pay £1,000 towards the cost of a summer holiday with the grandson’s extended family. By 2012 the grandmother was struggling and made repeated calls for help, but her package remained the same. 

This care package ended suddenly in February 2015 when the school said it could no longer meet the grandson’s complex needs. The grandmother has had no respite since this date. 

At one point after the respite care ended, the grandson was hospitalised following a severe epileptic episode, the grandmother became emotionally unwell and was unable to look after the teenager, and the council had to find a temporary placement for him.

She complained to the Ombudsman about the lack of respite care, the council’s transition planning and also about his Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP) not being completed in time.

The Ombudsman found fault with the council for not ensuring the transition assessment was started at the appropriate time and to complete it. This means the family have not been able to prepare for the teenager’s move to adult life.

The investigation also found the council’s failure to provide suitable alternative respite provision since 2015 meant the grandmother missed out on 43 days flexible respite and a seven day break for each of the  two years. This has placed an ‘exceptional strain’ on her as she has had to cope alone with her grandson’s sometimes violent behaviour, without a break.

The grandson has also lost the opportunity to gain some degree of independence living away, and he has missed time spent with his peers.

The Ombudsman has also found fault with the council for not ensuring the annual holiday payment, based on their assessed need, was paid in a timely way causing the grandmother additional stress and anxiety. 

The council was also at fault becauseit did not complete the transfer process to an EHCP within the statutory timescales. This has left the boy with an unacceptably short time to prepare for his September placement.

Michael King, Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman, said:

“This case involves a catalogue of unacceptable failings by London Borough of Croydon, which has left a family stretched to breaking point.

“Even before the respite package came to an end, this family was struggling. The grandmother made repeated calls for extra help and yet she was left to cope alone with her teenage grandson where ordinarily he would have had one-to-one specialist support at school.

“I hope the changes Croydon council now makes following my report will ensure no other families are left in a similar position.”

The Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman’s role is to remedy injustice and share learning from investigations to improve local public, and adult social care, services. 

In this case, London Borough of Croydon has agreed to apologise to the family for the failures identified in the report.

It will pay the grandmother and the grandson £5,000 each for the harm caused by not having suitable respite for two years. It will also pay the grandmother £1,250 to recognise the distress caused for having to pursue these matters over two years.

The council will complete a transition plan for the boy and if it has not already done so, it should issue the boy’s EHCP as soon as possible.

The council will urgently review its policies and procedures and draft a new transition policy document to provide staff with clear timelines and procedures to follow.

Last year the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman made nearly 4,000 recommendations to put things right for people who had suffered injustice – it announced in its Annual Report and Accounts 2016-17, published today.

The report details how the Ombudsman is making a difference through its investigations. As well as remedying injustices for individuals, more than 600 of those recommendations were to improve services for the public by recommending councils and care providers make policy and practice changes.

In addition, to help councils and care providers learn from its casework, the Ombudsman published three Focus Reports highlighting key themes and systemic issues it sees. These included issues when health and social care services fail to work together properly; unfairness in how complaints about parking fines are handled; and problems caused by changes to school transport policies. Its Annual Review of Adult Social Care Complaints highlighted a rise in complaints about home care services with nearly two thirds of investigations being upheld.

Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman, Michael King, said:

“We play a vital role in holding public services to account, and I have seen first-hand the huge difference we can make to people’s lives when we resolve serious failures.

“But it is not enough to fix people’s problems one by one. We must harness our unique insight into where things are going wrong to help councils and care providers improve services for everyone’s benefit.

“I am proud of the work we did last year, and the successes are down to the skills and dedication of every member of our staff.”

The Ombudsman is seeing more complaints related to reduced local government resources, and this is sometimes cited as a reason for service failure.

Michael King added:

“For us to alter our expectations in order to accommodate these challenges would be to let down the public and the bodies in jurisdiction themselves. We will continue to hold public bodies and care providers to account against the law, relevant guidance and their own policies; and share our findings to aid scrutiny of services.”

Last year the Ombudsman registered 19,077 new complaints and enquiries. It also dealt with a further 12,848 queries, which it was able to help with at first contact without registering a new case. It upheld 53% of complaints where it carried out an investigation.

As a proportion of its caseload, the Ombudsman received most complaints and enquiries about Education and Children’s Services (18%), followed by Adult Social Care (17%) and Planning and Development (13%). In terms of the number of complaints and enquiries registered, those about adult social care continued to rise, as they have for a number of years; those about housing, and benefits and tax, declined.

The report highlights the Ombudsman’s achievements, including meeting all of its time targets for completing investigations; maintaining customer satisfaction levels; and expanding the reach of its complaint handling training programme.

It completed 79% of investigations within 13 weeks; 92% of investigations within 26 weeks; and 99% of investigations within 52 weeks.

Ombudsman staff trained more than 1,200 council and care provider staff on good complaint handling through its training courses.

The Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman along with regulators, the Care Quality Commission (CQC) is joining more than 100 people, organisations and national bodies with an interest in adult social care to officially mark the launch of the Quality matters commitment.

Quality matters sets out a determined and shared vision on how quality care and support can be achieved and person-centred care becomes the norm for all. 

This piece of work has been jointly developed to ensure that staff, providers, commissioners and funders, regulators and other national bodies all play their part in listening to and acting upon the voice of people using services, their families and carers.

Andrea Sutcliffe, CQC’s Chief Inspector of Adult Social Care, said:

“I am delighted to support the launch of the Quality matters commitment.  This is an important moment for adult social care – such a broad coalition of people and organisations coming together to focus on quality will I hope make a sustainable difference for people using services, their families and carers.

“We know that the sustainability of good quality care is precarious so it has never been more important to bring everyone who cares about social care together to make sure quality remains central to all our work.

“Quality Matters has been developed in collaboration and our ambitions can only succeed if we continue to work together to embed the principles we have agreed and deliver the practical actions people said they wanted to see.

“I am grateful to everyone who has been involved in the development of Quality Matters but the real work starts now.  We have to make our ambitions a reality so that people using services, their families and carers can be confident that quality really does matter.”

Clenton Farquharson, Chair of Think Local Act Personal, said:

“There are so many great people who work in adult social care and quality is about what people who use services, their families and carers, tell each other it is. Through Quality matters, I want to feel confident that my mum will get great care even when I’m not there.”

Support worker, John Read, and Stuart Rowles on behalf of Learning Disability England said:

“We would like to say thank you for the opportunity to be part of Quality matters. Myself, Stu and the team work hard every day to make sure what we do is best for the people we support and getting support right requires partnership. We both feel that decisions made should always be the best and the 'just enough' is never enough.”

Jackie Doyle-Price MP, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Care and Mental Health said:

“Every day social care positively transforms lives in our country - supporting some of the most vulnerable people in our communities. We can be proud of the progress we are making on maintaining and improving quality but there is always more to do to address variation.

“That is why I welcome the launch of Quality matters and endorse the priority areas for action to make a real difference for people who use services, carers, families and everyone working in the sector.”

Imelda Redmond, National Director at Healthwatch England, said:

"Social care is in a fragile state but if we are going to tackle the challenges ahead we all need to work together and start to build some positive momentum.

"Quality matters is great way for us to celebrate the excellent care that is out there and help others to make the sort of changes, big and small, that will ensure everyone gets the high quality care they deserve.

"We will be supporting the Healthwatch network to play its part, promoting the benefits of listening to feedback, learning from complaints and commissioning based on experiences as well as outcomes."

Heléna Herklots, Chief Executive at Carers UK, said:

“I am delighted to be chairing the Quality matters launch event. It is so important for people, their families and carers, to know that quality really does matter to everyone in adult social care.”

Michael King, Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman, said:

“We have been actively involved throughout the life of Quality matters and welcome its publication.

“People should have a voice in designing the services they receive, whether they had a good or bad experience, because their feedback can be invaluable. That’s why the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman has worked with Healthwatch England to clarify the complaints process so organisations are clear and people know how to make a complaint.

“We are encouraging organisations to focus on the culture of how complaints are viewed and dealt with. This includes how their staff handle individual complaints, and how board members can have more oversight of complaints received about the services they are responsible for. We want to see care providers create a culture of quality across their whole organisation, regardless of people’s roles or responsibilities.

“As the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman, we share learning from the complaints we investigate to help drive service improvements. That’s why we wholeheartedly support Quality matters and hope it will help ensure people, and their carers, receive the quality of services they deserve.“

Margaret Willcox, President of the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services (ADASS), said:

“ADASS believes that everyone deserves to experience high-quality, personal, dignified adult social care if they need it. We recognise that there is a lot of great care provided by dedicated leaders and staff to people in their own homes and in care homes. This was recognised in the CQC’s ‘state of adult social care services report’ published last week.

“Whilst we recognise the pressure on the sector, not least the financial and workforce pressures, and continue to bring our influence to bear on these matters, we believe that more can and must be done to improve quality. 

“We are delighted that so many organisations have come together to develop the Quality matters initiative, showing a real commitment to improving the quality of services, and in turn the lives of those that use them.”

Cllr Izzi Seccombe, Chairman of the Local Government Association’s (LGA) Community Wellbeing Board, said:

“Quality is everybody’s business and the LGA is strongly committed to support councils to deliver high quality, safe and person-centred care and support to help our citizens.

“Despite the severe funding challenges facing adult social care, the majority of care is of a standard that we would expect for ourselves and our loved ones. We have worked closely with our national partners to develop our shared commitment to supporting local commissioners and providers deliver care which enriches and enhances lives and supports the workforce.

“If we are to achieve the standard of care and support we all aspire to and people deserve, we urgently need a long-term settlement for care, both in terms of around the type of system we want to provide and funding.”

Sharon Allen, Chief Executive at Skills for Care, said:

“Skills for Care is pleased to have supported the development of Quality matters, together with all the other partners, from the outset.  Together we have created a shared vision of what high quality care and support in our communities looks like and, more importantly, what we all need to do to achieve this.

“The adult social care workforce, including employers, leaders and managers, has a key role to play and our particular contribution is to encourage and support them to do this so that everyone who needs care and support can be confident of receiving high quality; and as importantly, everyone working to provide this can be confident of having a fulfilling and rewarding career.”