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A local authority has been obliged to pay about £17,000 of taxpayers’ money to a residential care home patient after it was found to have failed to use the correct language when explaining her charges.

North Yorkshire Council has also been recommended to pay the patient’s son £350 “to recognise the distress and anxiety caused” by its decision to treat monetary gifts to her children and grandchildren as capital that should be included when assessing how long she should be responsible for the full cost of her care.

Who should pay for social care remains a pressing issue with the council spending £230m a year on adult social care, equating to about 40 per cent of the authority’s budget.

This year it has received £19m additional grants from the government, but the council has spent an extra £36m on adult social care services.

The Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman said it had “found fault causing injustice” and to remedy the injustice by completing a financial assessment calculating when her capital would have fallen below the £23,250 threshold under which people pay the full costs of their care.

It also recommended the council reviews the financial assessments completed for other service users over the last 12 months where gifting was not deemed to be depriving the public purse of assets.

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While the Care Act 2014 states people should be able to spend the money they have saved as they wish, rules also state councils should ensure people are not rewarded for trying to avoid paying their assessed contribution.

Councils must therefore assess a person to decide whether they have intentionally deprived themselves of assets to avoid paying care fees, for example by making a lump sum payment to someone else as a gift.

The ombudsman’s report states the woman in care had previously gifted no more than £20 to her family, but in the two-and-a-half years following the sale of her property she gifted £19,500.

It is understood the officer who dealt with the assessment had been trying not to inflame a “deprivation of assets” situation and did not use those words when spelling out the reason for taking extra money from the woman.

Councillor Michael Harrison, executive member for health and adult services who is also the Conservative councillor for Killinghall, Hampsthwaite and Saltergate, said:

“We accept the fault that the ombudsman identified in the language we used.

“We need to be very careful if we’re going to make an assessment that someone has deprived themselves of capital to avoid paying social care fees that we are explicit in the language we use.”

The authority undertakes an average of 6,000 financial assessments every year.

Cllr Harrison said:

“Whilst we accept the ombudsman’s findings, we did disagree that this should be a public report.

“It has cost the taxpayer around £17,000, which is disappointing. It is a costly couple of words, but we are also mindful that we are dealing with people in sensitive circumstances and circumstances that can be quite emotional where people are having to look at their relatives’ finances in quite a cold way.

“Council officers will quite rightly want to treat people with respect, with empathy and due consideration. The learning here is that must not lead us to using words that a family may find difficult if we use if it’s going to cost the taxpayer money.”

Tories in Harrogate call for slimmed-down town council

Two Conservative councillors have called for the proposed number of people elected to a future Harrogate Town Council should be reduced from 19 to 10.

Cllr Sam Gibbs put forward the idea on behalf of himself and Cllr Michael Harrison at a meeting of the council’s standards and governance committee in Northallerton yesterday.

The two would also like to see councillors elected to a single council without wards, which they believe would allow the new council to work more effectively and not replicate the work of North Yorkshire Council councillors on issues like potholes and streetlights.

North Yorkshire Council is developing proposals to create town councils for Harrogate and Scarborough, which are the only two unparished areas in the county.

Officers have recommended that each of the proposed 10 wards in Harrogate, which are based on current North Yorkshire Council divisions, be represented by two councillors per ward with the exception of Saltergate, which would have one councillor.

But Cllr Gibbs, who represents the Valley Gardens and Central Harrogate division, said he was skeptical of the new council’s potential size, which he said would be “unwieldy”.

He said:

“A smaller number of councillors would be more desirable. It’s important if we create a parish council we get this right.”

The areas in Harrogate which would fall under the new town council.

The areas in Harrogate which would fall under the new town council.

Cllr Gibbs also said residents do not have attachments with the current council boundaries that would also be used for the town council.

He gave the example of his own division, which was created out of a combination of the old High Harrogate and Low Harrogate wards and includes over 6,000 households.

He said electing councillors to one council area would allow for a more “strategic” approach to local democracy.

However, Monika Slater, the Liberal Democrat councillor for Bilton Grange and New Park, said she was not in favour of their proposals. 

She said:

“The idea of having a single election for a handful of councillors representing the town as a whole is one I’m thoroughly against. The feedback I’m getting from residents is they are feeling a disconnect between themselves and North Yorkshire.

“They find it mysterious. They don’t really understand who is making decisions. Setting up a town council is about giving them that connection again.”

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Cllrs Gibbs and Harrison also suggested an option whereby one councillor is elected per ward rather than the two that have been proposed by North Yorkshire Council and this was supported by independent councillor for Filey, Sam Cross.

However, there were warnings from Cllr Slater that if the council decided to change how the town councils are formulated there would have to be a third public consultation which could confuse residents and risk delaying the process.

Councillors voted on Cllr Cross’ recommendation to create one-member wards in Harrogate and Scarborough based around the previous district council ward boundaries. 

With the votes tied 3-3, the chair of the committee, Conservative councillor Clive Pearson voted in favour so it was carried.

It was only a recommendation, however, and a final decision to create a town council has not been made yet. 

A full meeting of North Yorkshire Council will debate the proposals at a meeting on July 19.

Harrogate councillors renew calls for public involvement in Station Gateway plans

Councillors from Harrogate and Knaresborough have reiterated calls for “meaningful” involvement in the £11.2 million Station Gateway scheme.

The request followed the news that representatives of the Department for Transport and West Yorkshire Combined Authority visited Harrogate yesterday.

They were given a tour of the town centre and shown through plans for major changes to Station Parade and surrounding routes.

Speaking at today’s meeting of Harrogate and Knaresborough area constituency committee, North Yorkshire Council‘s head of major projects and infrastructure Richard Binks said:

“It was the first time they had actually visited the site in person. They were really taken with what they saw.

“They really think the scheme’s fantastic and were showing a great deal of support for the project.”

However, members of the committee expressed surprise that they were unaware the visit was taking place.

At a heated meeting on May, the same committee had agreed to support the project, provided the committee was given “meaningful involvement” in its execution.

NYC’s officers were also asked to meet face-to-face with local residents and businesses, which today’s meeting also heard had not yet happened.

The committee members were presented with a petition of 2,000 signatures opposing the Station Gateway project by local resident Rachel Inchborough, who told the meeting:

“We feel we’ve had a lack of any in-person consultation for residents and it is of a key significance. We’ve been offered a quick Zoom session online, at short notice, to tick boxes.

“Residents feel this was a complete insult.”

Councillors voted in May to support the Station Gateway scheme

Some of the committee members queried the petition’s veracity, saying its signatories included people from as far away as South Africa.

They also pointed out that even 500 local signatures – the threshold needed to have the petition debated by the committee – were not representative of all views from local residents.

Several Conservative members of the committee said they did not want to undermine the original vote in May to support the proposal.

Cllr Michael Harrison, a Conservative who represents Killinghall, Hampsthwaite and Saltergate, added:

“There’s a fundamental point here that this committee passed a resolution that we wanted a meaningful role in the implementation of the scheme.

“The chair is against the scheme. The chair wants to stop the scheme. The chair, despite what this committee said, went to the executive committee and implored them to stop the scheme. The petition wants to stop the scheme. The two things are at odds.

“We’re talking about people who want to stop the scheme, not who want meaningful input in the scheme. You can say what you like, but that’s the fact of the matter.

“I’m quite happy to have a meaningful role in implementing the scheme but we’re kidding ourselves if we think this is what this is.”

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However, other councillors called for officers to uphold the wishes of the committee to engage with the community about the detail of the proposal.

Cllr Monika Slater, a Liberal Democrat who represents Bilton Grange and New Park, said:

“This isn’t about trying to overthrow a motion we already passed at the previous meeting.

“This is genuinely about looking at the concerns of specific individuals and seeing if there are ways of mitigating and therefore bringing more of the public on side of actually supporting a scheme and involving the local councillors much more in that process.”

Councillors voted by eight to four in favour of asking for a full list of meetings to be held with local groups and for committee members to be invited as well. They also supported the proposal of a working group being set up, with representation from both the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, to focus on the Station Gateway project.

Cllr Chris Aldred, the Lib Dem representative for High Harrogate and Kingsley who put forward the motion, said:

“This is not designed to stop the scheme. It is designed for a scheme to continue.

“I voted for the original proposal and I’ve always said there are some parts of this scheme I find really attractive, One Arch being one of them.

“I do sincerely believe that we need to demonstrate that we’ve listened to the voices of the people who came to the last meeting, the people who’ve signed this petition.”