R (Buckinghamshire CC) v Kingston upon Thames RBC [2011] EWCA Civ 457 (Pill, Patten, Munby LJJ): Buckinghamshire had asserted that Kingston was under a legal duty to consult with Buckinghamshire before providing community care assistance, which resulted in a care home resident moving into supported housing in the Buckinghamshire area and, consequently, becoming Buckinghamshire’s responsibility. Dismissing Buckinghamshire’s appeal, the Court of Appeal held that the statutory context compelled the conclusion that Kingston’s only duties related to the welfare of the community care service user herself, who had wanted to live in Buckinghamshire. The case contains an interesting examination of the limits of the duty to consult based simply on fairness or detriment. Buckinghamshire have not sought to appeal further. Click here for the transcript. Kingston was represented by Stephen Knafler QC and Timothy Baldwin of Garden Court Chambers.
H and L v A City Council [2011] EWCA Civ 405 (Pill, Hooper, Munby LJJ): the local authority’s decision to disclose H’s conviction for an indecent assault on a child to disability organisations with which he worked was unlawful at common law and under Article 8 because: (i) the disclosure was neither fair, balanced nor proportionate given that neither H, nor his partner L, worked with children, and (ii) the process had been unfair in that neither H nor L had been given any opportunity of making representations before the disclosures had been made. Neither had it been lawful to impose conditions prohibiting H and L’s carers from bringing their children to work and allowing unsupervised contact with their children, as the carers’ contracts prohibited them from bringing any person to work. Further, it was not lawful for local authorities to impose a condition that required direct payments, under section 57 of the Health and Social Care Act 2001, to be placed in a managed account: it was of the essence of the direct payment scheme that responsibility for managing direct payments passed to the service user or their nominee. Click here for the transcript.
R (Rotao Rahman) v Birmingham CC [2011] EWCA Civ 944 (Admin) (Blake J): the local authority’s decisions to terminate funding for local Legal Entitlement Advice Services had been unlawful because it had failed to have due regard to the public sector equalities duties, in particular those at section 71 of the Race Relations Act 1976 and section 49A of the Disability Discrimination Act 1995. However, the decisions were only quashed insofar as they affected the LEAS’s that had become parties to the judicial review proceedings. Click here for the transcript.
R (W) v Croydon LBC [2011] EWHC 696 (Admin)(Ouseley J): the local authority had failed to consult adequately with the parents, before deciding to move a young adult from a specialist care home into supported living, in particular in that it had made its decision before the assessment meeting took place and had failed to alert the parents to its thinking. Click here for the transcript.
