Country Court Care Ltd & Ors v Secretary of State for the Home Department

Judicial review of a Tier 2 sponsor-licence revocation requires respect for the Secretary of State’s primary judgment, subject to ordinary supervisory principles and, where relevant, Article 8 proportionality. The Tier 2 and Tier 4 schemes engage substantially the same principles. A sponsor’s past reporting failures may inform whether it currently operates adequate compliance procedures. The Secretary of State may treat accurate and timely reporting through the prescribed system as essential to immigration control. Where breaches have seriously undermined trust, revocation rather than downgrading may be proportionate. The interests and Article 8 rights of care-home residents are material, but they do not ordinarily require downgrading where revocation is otherwise justified.

The claimants sought permission to challenge decisions revoking and maintaining the revocation of Country Court Care Ltd’s Tier 2 sponsor licence. The alleged grounds included irrationality, procedural impropriety, failure to consider discretion and failure to address later representations. The revocation followed inspection findings concerning failures to report workers leaving employment, failures to report changes in work location, and documentary deficiencies. The claimants also relied on the Article 8 rights of residents and other clients of their care homes. The central issues were whether the Tier 2 scheme attracted the same supervisory principles as the Tier 4 scheme, whether the revocation grounds were lawfully applied, and whether revocation was a proportionate response.

1. Permission dismissed. The interim-relief question therefore did not arise.
2. The principles developed in Tier 4 sponsor-licence cases applied, subject to the additional relevance of residents’ Article 8 rights, to Tier 2 cases. The Secretary of State has the primary judgment on the appropriate response to sponsor breaches. The court’s role is supervisory, and considerable weight is due to the Secretary of State’s experience in immigration control.
3. Past failures to report sponsored workers leaving employment were relevant to assessing current compliance. The decision letter could properly be read as expressing dissatisfaction with the claimant’s current processes under Annex 6 paragraph (j). In any event, the failures independently engaged Annex 6 paragraph (g).
4. The Secretary of State had considered the available responses, including downgrading and an action plan, and gave rational reasons for concluding that the breaches were sufficiently severe and frequent to warrant revocation. The importance of reporting through the Sponsor Management System, rather than relying on information discovered by official inspections, was a matter the Secretary of State was entitled to emphasise.
5. The Secretary of State was entitled to conclude that the claimant had knowingly supplied false information concerning workers’ locations and that mandatory revocation under Annex 5 paragraph (j) was warranted. That conclusion meant that the other challenges did not affect the result.
6. Removal from a person’s home engages Article 8, requiring consideration of interference and proportionality. The court assumed that abrupt withdrawal of care services might also engage private-life rights. Nevertheless, any interference resulting from justified enforcement of the sponsor system was a necessary and proportionate consequence. Article 8 did not require downgrading instead of revocation.

The judgment was a first-instance permission decision. Interim relief had previously been granted by Andrews J on 22 April 2015, requiring the revocation to be treated as a suspension pending the hearing or further order.