KM, R (on the application of) v Cambridgeshire County Council

A local authority may use a Resource Allocation System to produce an indicative personal budget, including one based on relative need and average costs. The figure must remain the starting point rather than the end of the process. It must be checked against the person’s assessed needs and adjusted where necessary.

Once eligible needs have been assessed, the authority must make provision reasonably sufficient to meet them. A reasons challenge requires intelligible and adequate reasons addressing the principal controversial issues. A challenge to the authority’s professional assessment of the reasonable cost of meeting needs will generally be a merits challenge, subject to the high threshold for irrationality.

The claimant, a young adult with serious physical and mental disabilities, sought judicial review of the defendant local authority’s decision to award him £84,678 as a direct payment for assessed care needs.

The claim originally alleged failures to assess needs, give reasons, use a transparent methodology and adapt the claimant’s home. The home-adaptation issue fell away. The principal remaining issues were whether the authority had given adequate reasons, whether its use of a Resource Allocation System was lawful, and whether the resulting funding decision was irrational.

1. Outcome. The reasons and rationality challenges were held to be unsustainable and unarguable. Permission to proceed with judicial review was refused.
2. Statutory duty and resource allocation. The authority had to assess the claimant’s needs and make provision reasonably sufficient to meet his assessed eligible needs. Section 2 of the Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act 1970 imposed an enforceable duty once the authority was satisfied that arrangements were necessary. Resources could be considered at the assessment and allocation stages, but could not justify leaving an established duty unperformed.
3. Resource Allocation System. The authority’s RAS and Upper Banding Calculator were lawful because they generated an indicative figure. The figure was checked against an independent assessment of needs and reviewed by experienced social workers using professional judgment. The system did not require the authority to construct a package by pricing individual services, since the self-directed support model left the claimant to decide how to use a sufficient personal budget.
4. Reasons. Applying the approach in Savva and [2010] EWCA Civ 1209, and the general principles stated in South Bucks DC v Porter and [2004] 1 WLR 1953, the reasons had to be intelligible and adequate in the context of the decision. The authority’s correspondence explained the assessed needs, the indicative basic allocation, the specialist-care calculation and the resulting figure. It was not required to disclose the detailed RAS algorithm.
5. Rationality. The authority had ample material for its judgment about the reasonable cost of meeting the claimant’s assessed needs. The claimant’s criticisms of the hourly rates, services and total funding invited the court to substitute its own assessment on the merits. That was impermissible on judicial review and did not meet the high threshold for irrationality.
6. The authority’s statement that it did not fund holidays did not establish unlawfulness. Section 2(f) required arrangements facilitating holidays where necessary, rather than payment for a holiday itself, and a sufficient flexible direct payment could fulfil that obligation.

Not stated in the judgment.