Aburas, R. (on the application of) v London Borough of Southwark

Under Part I of the Care Act 2014, accommodation is not itself a need for care and support. It may nevertheless be required where accommodation is the necessary means of delivering effective care and support for a distinct “looked-after need”.

Convention rights may require a local authority to exercise its power to meet a non-eligible need under section 19, read compatibly with the Human Rights Act 1998. The relevant threshold is whether, on a fair and objective assessment, refusal creates an imminent prospect of serious suffering caused or materially aggravated by denial of the necessary support. Destitution and ordinary accommodation needs remain matters for the statutory scheme applicable to them, including asylum support. The claim failed because the evidence did not establish the necessary looked-after need or the required degree of suffering.

The claimant was a failed asylum-seeker with mental and physical health difficulties, no regular immigration status and no recourse to public funds. He was homeless and had previously received asylum support. A social worker’s assessment under section 9 of the Care Act 2014 concluded that he had neither eligible nor non-eligible needs requiring action by the defendant local authority.

The claimant sought judicial review solely on Convention-rights grounds. He argued that he needed social-worker support to access food and medication, and that accommodation was necessary for the effective delivery of that support. The central issue was whether refusal of such supported accommodation was incompatible with Articles 3 or 8.

1. Claim dismissed. The local authority had not acted unlawfully. Accommodation is not itself a need for care and support under Part I of the Care Act 2014. It may be provided where a distinct looked-after need exists and accommodation is necessary for the effective delivery of care and support for that need.
2. Eligible needs under section 18 trigger a statutory duty. Non-eligible needs fall within the power in section 19. Where Convention rights require action for a looked-after need that does not satisfy the statutory eligibility criteria, section 19 must be read, pursuant to sections 3 and 6 of the Human Rights Act 1998, as requiring the authority to exercise the power compatibly with those rights.
3. The appropriate threshold, derived from Limbuela and applied in the looked-after-needs context, was whether a fair and objective assessment disclosed an imminent prospect of serious suffering caused or materially aggravated by refusal of the necessary support. Relevant factors included age, gender, mental and physical health, available facilities or support, weather and the duration of privation.
4. The evidence did not establish that the claimant needed a social worker to prompt him to eat, take medication or access treatment. It also did not establish that accommodation was necessary to deliver such support, or that failure to provide it created an imminent prospect of serious suffering or denied a basic necessity of life. Professional evidence supporting vulnerability and the benefits of emergency accommodation concerned destitution and subsistence, which were matters for the Home Secretary and asylum support.
5. Article 8 added nothing material on these facts. The court followed the analysis in AR that a pure accommodation-need claim could not be brought under the Localism Act 2011, while leaving open whether that Act might have a role in a different case involving neither accommodation alone nor a looked-after need.