LGO tells council to repay waste disposal charges to care homes

A local authority had no lawful power to charge care homes for disposing of non-clinical waste and so should refund the owners the amounts they paid over a series of years, a Local Government Ombudsman report has concluded.

Mr N, a member of the Community Care Association, complained to the LGO that for many years Kingston-upon-Hull City Council wrongly charged care homes for such disposals.

Hull changed its policy in April 2008 after it received a letter from the Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. However, the local authority refused to refund charges it had made before then. The complainant said that, in one year, the home he manages was wrongly charged almost £2,000.

In a report the Ombudsman, Anne Seex, concluded that the regulations did not allow councils to charge care homes for disposing of non-clinical waste, although there can be a charge for collecting waste under Regulation 4 and Schedule 2 to the Controlled Waste Regulations 1992. The position was clear from a Government Circular issued in 1992, she said.

The LGO said Hull should refund the charges it had made to Mr N and to other care homes before April 2008.

Seex said: “The council has no lawful power to charge care homes for disposing of non-clinical waste. It must follow that it has no lawful power to retain the money it collected from the home managed by [the complainant] and others. There is no suggestion that the council acted in bad faith but it has acted with maladministration in making the charges and keeping the money up to April 2008.”

In response to the LGO’s draft report, the local authority suggested that the 1992 Regulations were ambiguous and could be interpreted differently. It also suggested that it was only when DEFRA wrote to local authorities in 2007 that the council had a clear understanding of applying a charging system.

Hull said that up to that point, both the legislation and guidance were not sufficiently clear. It added that its charging structure was amended within a reasonable time frame following an internal review after receiving the DEFRA letter.