EHCP 20-Week Deadline Missed: What to Do When the LA Is Late

The 20-week statutory deadline for completing an EHC needs assessment and issuing a final EHCP is one of the most violated rules in the entire SEND system. In 2024, only 46.4% of new EHCPs in England were issued within the legal 20-week timeframe — down from 50.3% the previous year, and well below the roughly 60% compliance rate seen between 2018 and 2021.

That means more than half of families waited longer than the law allows. Many waited far longer: 46.2% of delayed plans took between 20 and 52 weeks, and 7.3% took over a year.

If your local authority has missed the 20-week deadline, you have not simply had bad luck. You are in the majority, and there are specific steps you need to take.

What the 20-Week Timeline Actually Covers

The clock starts the day the local authority receives a valid request for an EHC needs assessment — whether that request came from you, the school, or another professional. From that point, the LA must:

• Decide within 6 weeks whether to agree to carry out the assessment
• If it agrees, complete the assessment — gathering advice from educational, medical, psychological, and social care professionals — within the overall 20-week period
• Issue a draft EHCP (which you have at least 15 days to review and comment on)
• Issue a final EHCP no later than 20 weeks from the original request

These are not aspirational targets. They are statutory duties under the Children and Families Act 2014 and the SEND Regulations 2014. A local authority that misses the 20-week deadline is in breach of its statutory obligations, full stop.

The Only Lawful Exceptions

The regulations allow for a very narrow set of exceptions where exceeding 20 weeks is lawful:

• If the child is not present in England during the assessment period
• If it has not been possible to gather all the professional advice required and the LA cannot reasonably be expected to have secured it within the timeframe

"Staff shortages," "high demand," and "we are very busy" do not qualify as exceptions. The administrative pressures facing local authorities are not your legal problem, and they do not excuse a breach of statutory duty. If your LA is citing general resource constraints as a reason for the delay, that reason is not lawful.

Step 1: Get the Breach on Record

As soon as the 20-week deadline has passed, send a formal letter to the LA's Director of Children's Services — not to a caseworker, and not by phone. Written correspondence creates a dated record that is important if escalation becomes necessary.

The letter should:

• State the date of the original EHC needs assessment request (have your acknowledgment letter to hand)
• Calculate and state when the 20-week deadline fell
• Confirm that no final EHCP has been issued
• State that the LA is in breach of its statutory duty under the Children and Families Act 2014 and the SEND Regulations 2014
• Request confirmation of when the final EHCP will be issued, with a specific date (not "as soon as possible")
• Set a deadline — typically 7 to 14 days — for a substantive response

Keep the letter factual and formal. Do not make threats you are not prepared to follow through on. Do not use emotional language. This is an administrative escalation, not a complaint about how you have been treated personally.

Step 2: Chase the Professional Advice

The most common reason local authorities give for missing the 20-week deadline is that they are waiting for one or more of the professional reports — typically from health services (a paediatrician report, a speech and language therapy assessment) or from the educational psychology service.

Here is the important point: the local authority has a duty to chase those reports. It cannot simply wait indefinitely and blame the NHS or the school for the delay. If the LA has not received a report within the statutory 6-week window for professional advice, it should be escalating within its own systems.

You can independently contact the professionals involved — particularly the school SENCO and the educational psychology service — to confirm the status of their reports. If a report has been completed and submitted but the LA claims not to have received it, that is a separate and serious administrative failure.

Step 3: Use the LA's Formal Complaints Process

If the breach is significant — more than a few weeks past the deadline — or if the LA's response to your initial letter is inadequate, submit a formal complaint through the LA's internal complaints procedure.

Address the complaint to the Director of Children's Services and copy it to the LA's monitoring officer. The complaint should clearly state:

• The specific statutory duty that has been breached (s.36 CFA 2014 and the SEND Regulations)
• The date the deadline was missed
• The impact on your child — specifically, any educational provision that has been delayed as a result
• What you want: a specific date by which the final EHCP will be issued

The LA must acknowledge a formal complaint within 3 working days and provide a substantive response within 20 working days. If it does not, that is an additional failure.

Step 4: Consider the LGSCO

If internal complaints fail to produce a specific commitment and a final EHCP within a reasonable period, you can refer the matter to the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman (LGSCO). The LGSCO investigates maladministration by local authorities — and delays in the EHCP process are one of the most commonly upheld categories of complaint. In 2024-25, 83% to 92% of investigated SEND complaints were upheld.

The LGSCO can order the local authority to issue the EHCP, to apologise, and to pay financial compensation for the impact of the delay. However, the LGSCO process is slow — investigations typically take several months. It should not be your first step, but it is a meaningful one if earlier escalation fails.

Step 5: Judicial Review for Urgent Cases

If your child is out of school entirely, in an actively harmful placement, or if the delay has extended to many months, a pre-action protocol (PAP) letter threatening judicial review from a solicitor can produce rapid compliance. Local authorities are acutely aware that judicial review proceedings are expensive for them and public. In many cases, a solicitor's PAP letter results in the EHCP being issued within days.

This is not a step to take lightly — solicitor letters cost money — but it is often the only mechanism that produces immediate results in severe cases. IPSEA can advise on whether this is appropriate for your situation.

While You Are Waiting

The delay in issuing an EHCP does not suspend the LA's other duties. If your child is of compulsory school age and cannot access suitable education due to the delay, the local authority has a duty under Section 19 of the Education Act 1996 to make alternative arrangements. This is a separate, parallel obligation that exists regardless of the EHCP timeline.

If provision is failing because the EHCP has not been issued, document what is being missed — specific sessions, specific support, specific interventions. This contemporaneous record becomes the basis for a compensation claim via the LGSCO if the delay causes demonstrable harm.

The England SEND Tribunal Playbook includes template language for the formal chase letter, the complaint letter, and the LGSCO referral, structured around the specific statutory provisions — so you are not writing from scratch when the deadline passes.

Why This Keeps Happening

Local authorities in England are managing an impossible volume of requests. In 2024, 154,489 EHC needs assessment requests were received — an 11.8% increase from the previous year — against a system with finite administrative capacity and chronic high-needs funding deficits totalling approximately £3.9 billion nationally.

None of that is your legal problem. The statutory deadline exists precisely because Parliament understood that delay causes direct harm to children with SEND, who lose months of appropriate educational support every time an LA misses the 20-week mark. The legal framework is clear. Using it is not aggressive — it is exactly what it is there for.

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