Care Act & Judicial Review Risk Audit

1. Service Overview

The Care Act & JR Risk Audit is a rigorous quality-assurance program designed for Local Authority adult social care directorates, QA leads, and NHS continuing healthcare (CHC) boards.

Under Section 9 of the Care Act 2014, local authorities have strict duties to conduct timely, lawful, and person-centred needs assessments. However, operational friction and budgetary limits frequently lead to shortcut assessments, rigid resource allocation rules, and arbitrary panel caps on funding packages. These shortcuts create massive legal vulnerabilities, leaving public bodies open to high-profile judicial reviews.

This service provides an **independent, third-party audit** of your casework files, assessment templates, and funding panel decisions to verify compliance and locate procedural vulnerabilities before they lead to formal pre-action protocol letters.

2. The Challenges We Solve

We help governance leads resolve severe operational and compliance problems, including:

• Unlawful Resource Allocation: Resource allocation tools (RAS) dictating care package funding rather than serving as an indicative guide as mandated by law.
• Inadequate Needs Documentation: Failure to document how specific care eligibility determinations under Section 13 were reached.
• Arbitrary Panel Caps: Care funding panels rejecting social worker recommendations on purely financial grounds without considering statutory duties.
• Ordinary Residence Disputes: Complex inter-authority disputes that delay care delivery and expose the authority to operational and legal sanctions.

3. The LEX NEGATA Solution

Our audit is designed to build a **Procedural Defensibility Index (PDI)** for your casework. We don't just point out errors; we restructure the pathway:

We review a sample of active and closed care files, benchmark them against statutory compliance checklists, and deliver redlined feedback to rewrite templates. This ensures that every eligibility decision, care plan, and panel minutes entry has a clear, auditable trail that shows the authority acted lawfully, rationally, and with due regard to its statutory target duties.

4. Step-by-Step Methodology

We execute the audit through a structured, 4-stage process:

1. Stage 1: Scope & Intake (Week 1): Initial alignment with QA leads to select file cohorts (e.g. high-cost learning disability packages or transition cases) and ingest templates securely.
2. Stage 2: File Audit & Benchmark (Weeks 2-4): Detailed line-by-line review of files against our 32-point Care Act Defensibility Checklist.
3. Stage 3: Reporting & Redlining (Week 5): Preparing the audit report, risk register, and proposed template edits.
4. Stage 4: Implementation Workshop (Week 6): A feedback briefing with managers and directors to go over findings and guide staff on compliance adjustments.

5. Key Project Deliverables

Every audit project yields a comprehensive set of governance assets:

• • Casework Compliance Audit Report: Detailed analysis of audited file cohorts.
• • Procedural Risk Register: Explicit mapping of systemic vulnerabilities ranked by litigation probability.
• • Redlined Assessment Templates: Actionable modifications to assessment and care planning forms.
• • Funding Panel Guidance Notes: Standard operating procedures to ensure panel decisions are legally defensible.

6. Project Duration & Investment Guide

Typical Duration: 4 to 8 weeks, depending on file cohort size (standard scope is 25-50 files).

Investment Guide: Projects are scoped on a fixed-fee basis matching the cohort size and governance complexity. Pricing is enquiry-based, framed professionally to fit public sector procurement budgets. Please contact us to request a formal quote.

7. Frequently Asked Questions