The only people whom authorities can lawfully refuse to assess, are those whose circumstances would be insufficient to strike any reasonable authority as even an appearance of a possible need for any service which could feasibly be a service which there is legal power for that authority to provide.
For instance, emergency surgery and registration for PhDs are obviously out of the range of services which could conceivably be community care services. Gardening and dress making are not NHS services.
However, help with shopping and cleaning, and firelighting, and bathing, and the provision of company, night sitting, etc. are NOT able to be regarded definitively as being outside the range of community care services which could conceivably and lawfully be supplied by an authority. Continuing NHS funded care, even if it is to be provided to very few people after the Free Nursing provisions come in for registered nursing services in nursing homes, is still a service, for which there has to be provision for an assessment, if someone contends that they qualify. The suggestion that simply because one has a learning disability, for instance, one can never qualify for continuing care, so that there’s no point in assessing the person, would be an unlawful stance for a Health Authority to take.
Once someone’s situation or perceived difficulty gets them over the very low threshold for entitlement to an assessment, then the person is entitled to a proper assessment, though not necessarily a very comprehensive or searching one. However superficial that first look might be, if it results in the authority’s staff saying there’s nothing more that we can do, then the authority has to be able to establish in law that what has gone before, deserved to be called an assessment for the services which it has power to provide.
It has been decided in the Penfold case that it is unlawful to apply the criteria by which the (local) authority goes at the care provision decision making stage to the stage of deciding whether or not to assess someone. Since those criteria will have been lawfully set by reference to budget, resources have already been taken into account. That is lawful at the provision decision stage, but not at the front end of the (community care) process. Thus using eligibility criteria at the front end, for anything other than deciding what type, level or urgency of community care assessment ‘proper’ to give someone, would be unlawful.