Yes. An authority, having agreed or had imposed by statute a set of criteria for the sake of equitable and fair dealing between all of its potential clients, has to do more than pay lip service to the idea of applying the words in those criteria.
Eligibility criteria must be capable of some objective interpretation, if they are to be of any use to anyone and, when a situation arises for consideration which obviously fits fair and square within the wording, the authority must acknowledge that that is the case.
In the case of Ealing LBC ex p C at first instance, the Authority refused to accept that a boy was disabled according to its own criteria for the highest category of need for respite services. The judge found that no reasonable authority could possibly think that the boy was outside the wording it had chosen as the threshold for eligibility.
The Care Act Eligibility regulations lay down national criteria for eligibility for adults with needs for care or support and for carers. The wording of those criteria has yet to be tested in the courts, but they must be applied according to fundamental public law principles. If an authority were to make decisions which were so irrational that no reasonable authority could possibly think that the individual did not meet the criteria then such a decision would clearly be unlawful. In addition, it would also be an unlawful fettering of a local authority’s discretion to create a blanket policy (by means of a consistent practice) to reject everyone rather than carrying out an objective assessment on a case by case basis of whether an individual’s needs meet the eligibility criteria.
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