The Court of Appeal allowed the Minister for Social Protection’s appeal against a High Court decision that had quashed two refusals of domiciliary care allowance to a mother applying for her son. The appeal court reversed the High Court ruling, finding that the evidence did not establish that the Department operated an unlawful fixed policy requiring deciding officers to follow medical assessors.
The anonymised applicant, Ms B., is the primary carer of her son, R., who was diagnosed with high functioning autism in February 2013. The judgment records her account of his care needs, including supervision with toilet facilities and outdoor play, help with dressing and schoolwork, and episodes of waking at night and tantrums. A multidisciplinary assessment said he met the allowance criteria, but gave no precise reasons for concluding that his care needs substantially exceeded those of a child of the same age.
Department medical assessors accepted that R. had additional care needs but concluded that the submitted medical evidence did not show a need for substantially greater care. Deciding officers refused the application and later affirmed that decision on review. The dispute before the courts concerned whether the Department’s decision-makers independently assessed the application or effectively treated the medical assessor’s view as decisive.
The High Court had found that the initial deciding officer unlawfully deferred to the assessor. It relied in part on figures obtained through a freedom of information request: the officer made 3,806 decisions, and the applicant’s solicitor said none departed from the medical assessor’s opinion. The Department said deciding officers made the final decisions, while acknowledging that it would be highly unusual for them to decide against an assessor’s view.
The Court of Appeal said deciding officers must make their own decision while having regard to the assessor’s opinion, as required by the Social Welfare (Consolidation) Act 2005. A deciding officer would act unlawfully if they considered themselves bound by the assessor. But the fact that officers usually followed assessors did not, by itself, prove that they had adopted a fixed policy or surrendered their statutory discretion.
The court found no evidence, beyond the statistics, that the deciding officer in this case treated herself as bound by the assessor. It also noted that neither in the High Court nor on appeal had the reasonableness of the individual decisions been challenged. The ruling therefore addresses the alleged fixed policy; it does not determine that the allowance criteria were met or independently resolve the reasonableness of the refusals. The judgment allowed the appeal and reversed the High Court decision.