London College of Business Management and Information, R (on the application of) v Secretary of State for the Home Department

A sponsor-licence revocation decision must address the material representations and proposed remedial measures made by the sponsor. A decision-maker cannot rely retrospectively on a narrower justification if the decision letter treated several matters as material and did not establish that the outcome would inevitably have been the same. Material factual errors and failures to consider relevant matters may therefore require the decision to be quashed and retaken.

The claimant, an educational college holding a Tier 4 sponsor licence, challenged the Secretary of State’s decision of 5 January 2015 revoking that licence. The decision relied on several grounds, including students associated with invalid or questionable ETS English-language certificates, recruitment and record-keeping concerns, and other matters. At the hearing, the approved-qualification ground was abandoned, and the Secretary of State principally relied on the invalid ETS certificates.

The central issues were whether the decision letter adequately considered the college’s representations and recruitment plan, whether material factual errors affected the decision, and whether the Secretary of State had shown that revocation would inevitably have followed from the remaining ground alone.

1. The claim succeeded. Permission was granted and the decision revoking the sponsor licence was quashed. The decision had to be retaken.
2. The Secretary of State was entitled to accord substantial weight to immigration-control risks and to the expertise of the sponsor-licensing system. The grant of a sponsor licence is a privilege, and sponsors are expected to maintain rigorous recruitment and compliance procedures.
3. The decision letter treated the ETS issue as a composite reason involving both 313 invalid certificates and 126 questionable certificates. The Secretary of State therefore had to show that the decision would inevitably have been the same without reliance on the questionable-certificate issue. The later witness statement asserting that the invalid certificates alone justified revocation was an impermissible ex post facto justification.
4. The decision letter contained material factual errors. It wrongly stated that three students had not been withdrawn and wrongly stated that the college had provided no information about the proposed treatment of students with questionable certificates.
5. The letter also failed adequately to engage with the college’s recruitment plan, including the proposed increase in sampling, reduction in CAS allocations, higher English-language requirement and further testing arrangements. The court expressed concern about those failures, although the decision was quashed principally because inevitability had not been established.
6. The claimant was awarded its judicial-review costs, subject to detailed assessment. The defendant’s costs of the refused application to adduce further evidence were to be set off against those costs.