64 During a monitoring visit to a residential insti­ tution, representatives of the Children’s Division interviewed a 14-year-old girl. She told them that she liked living at the institution. She was therefore unhappy that the local authority had informed her seven months earlier that she would be moved to a foster family and that it was working to find a family for her. Since then, she had heard nothing further from the local authority. This unsettled her and the uncer­ tainty about her future was very difficult for her. The Ombudsman passed the girl’s wishes on to the local authority, which then decided that she was to remain at the institution where she was living. The Ombudsman cannot decide where a child in care is to live, but he can pass on the child’s wishes to the relevant authority and thus help ensure that the child’s wishes and views are taken into account when the authority con­ siders the issue. A 14-year-old boy asked the Ombudsman for help to prevent his mother’s boyfriend, who was a foreigner, being expelled from the country. Among other things, the boy wrote that his mother’s boyfriend had become a second father to him and that they all got on well – he, his mother and her boyfriend. The Ombudsman told the boy that he under­ stood why he would like his mother’s boyfriend to remain with him and his mother. However, as the boy’s letter was not about his own case, but that of his mother’s boyfriend, the boy was not a so-called party to the case. The Ombudsman therefore took no action in response to the boy’s letter. If a ‘third party’ submits a complaint to the Ombudsman which includes information about another person, it is the Ombudsman’s estab­ lished practice to seek the consent of the other person – usually in the form of an original power of attorney – in order to ensure that he or she agrees to the Ombudsman’s considering the complaint. A woman lodged a complaint with the Ombudsman because the local authority in the area where she used to live refused to transfer its status as the authority responsible for her daughter, who had been compulsorily placed in care, to the local authority where the woman now lived. It was the woman’s former local authority which had placed her daughter in care, and it was therefore the authority responsible for her daughter, even though the woman had moved to another local authority area. The rules allowed the woman’s current and former local authority to agree a transfer of responsibility for her daughter to the woman’s current local authority, but her former local authority did not wish to enter into such an agreement. It took the view that its retaining responsibility would ensure the best continuity for the woman’s daughter. The Ombudsman wrote to the woman that he considered it unlikely that he would be able to criticise her former local authority’s decision to retain responsibility and therefore closed the case. If the Ombudsman believes he is unlikely to be able to criticise the decisions made in a case, he typi­ cally closes the case without asking the authorities involved for a statement.