The High Court has declined all relief sought by a father and his three children in a judicial review of Dublin City Council’s assessment of his social housing need. The court found no legal deficiency in the Council’s decision-making on whether the family had a reasonable requirement to live together for the purposes of the housing legislation.
The judgment, delivered by Mr Justice Max Barrett on 19 November 2018, concerned the Council’s decision to assess the father’s household as one person, with a need for a one-bedroom unit. The father and his former partner were co-parenting their children, and he had overnight access during the week. The judgment said the precise level of overnight access appeared to vary.
The Council had known of an overnight access arrangement since at least 28 August 2017, when both parents recorded it in a Council form. The father applied for social housing on 13 September 2017 after the couple separated.
The father argued that there had been no proper or adequate assessment of him and the children under section 20 of the Housing (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 2009, and that the Council had unlawfully fettered its discretion. The central issue at the hearing was the meaning of the statutory phrase covering people who do not live together but who, in the housing authority’s opinion, have a reasonable requirement to live together.
The court said the Council’s opinion was determinative if lawfully reached. It interpreted the test as involving an impersonal objective standard informed by social norms, while also recognising the social purposes of the legislation, the claims of others, and the scale of the Council’s responsibilities.
The Council said it considered the applicants’ housing needs, the accommodation available or likely to be available to the children with their mother, the resources available to the Council, the risk of under-use if bedrooms were allocated to the children in separate homes, and the needs of other families on housing lists for larger accommodation. The judge considered that approach a proper and lawful application of the relevant principles. He also accepted that a decision-maker should not take an unduly blinkered approach to relevant facts, but found no such deficiency on the facts before him.
The court declined all relief sought. It confined the judgment to the statutory interpretation issue argued at the hearing; it did not address the wider matters that had appeared in the pleadings.