1. Following financial assessments for adult social care eligibility – on how many occasions did the council judge there had been a deliberate deprivation of assets by the person being assessed? Please provide your answer broken down by the following years.
19/20
20/21
21/22
22/23
23/24
The year should correspond with the date the financial assessment was made.
2. Over the past five years, in how many cases did the council successfully recover monies or capital having concluded there had been a deliberate deprivation of assets? Again can you break this down by the following financial years:
19/20
20/21
21/22
22/23
23/24
The year should correspond with the date the monies or capital was successfully recovered.
3. For each of the last five years, what is the overall sum (£) in both monies and capital the council has recovered through identifying deliberately deprived assets? Again can you break this down by the following financial years:
19/20
20/21
21/22
22/23
23/24
– For example if the council had assessed an elderly person had transferred £10,000 to a family member before their financial assessment and that transaction had been judged as a deprivation of assets (and the family’s appeal was not successful) – the amount you would enter for this individual would be £10,000. A common parlance way of wording this would be to say how much was “recovered” by the council in deprivation of assets cases, in total, by financial year.
In response to questions 1-3, Devon County Council believes that compliance with this request would exceed the appropriate cost limit under Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 which is £450 or 18 hours of officer time.
We can confirm that information is held, however, it is held on individual case files and is not collated separately. To retrieve the information would require a manual review of all individual case files. We estimate that each review would take 30 minutes. We would need to review more than 20,000 individual case files. Therefore, to carry out this task would take in excess of the appropriate cost limit.
Under the Act, there is a duty to provide advice and assistance about how a request can be refined to fit within the appropriate limit. Unfortunately, due to the way the data is held this is not possible for this request.