THERE has been a seven-fold increase in legal applications to confine elderly and disabled people in care homes and hospitals in East Lancashire.

A landmark court ruling earlier this year lowered the threshold for which organisations are required to obtain legal clearance to deprive people of their liberty, which has resulted in a massive increase in applications across England.

In the first three months of this financial year, Blackburn with Darwen Council dealt with 99 applications for Deprivation of Liberty Orders, compared with just 27 in the whole of 2013/14, while Lancashire County Council (LCC) dealt with 455 applications, compared to 269 last year.

This has had a massive impact on social services staff, who have been struggling to cope with the increased workload.

Steve Gross, adult services boss at LCC, said: “Like other councils across the UK, we’ve seen a very steep rise in the number of Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards (DoLS) applications since the threshold was changed by the Supreme Court ruling in March.

“To help us to deal with these major changes, we are training more specialist assessors and prioritising assessments for people who don’t have family or friends to act on their behalf.

“We are fortunate in having our own dedicated DoLS team, which is not the case everywhere, and they are working incredibly hard with local residential care providers and others to make sure we comply with the ruling.”

Stephen Tingle, his counterpart at Blackburn with Darwen, said: “We have done a lot of work in response to the ruling, as have all local authorities, to ensure that we are able to respond to the increase in applications, and continue to work with care providers.”

The court ruling said that there is a deprivation of liberty where the person is under ‘continuous supervision and control and is not free to leave, and the person lacks capacity to consent to these arrangements’.

It also held that the fact that a person may be compliant with the restrictions, may be well cared for and have the best possible quality of life given their needs, is not relevant.