High Court provides guidance on interaction between Schedule 10 accommodation and Care Act duties

In two mammoth judgments, Fordham J has given detailed guidance about the duties owed to disabled people on immigration bail by the Home Office and local authorities. The two judgments, BLZ No. 1: R (BLZ) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2025] EWHC 153 (Admin) and  BLZ No.2: R (BLZ) v Leeds City Council [2025] EWHC 154 (Admin) run to a total of 151 paragraphs and cover a huge range of issues.

Background

This issue arose in a factual context that will be familiar to those who represent immigration detainees. The Home Secretary decided to release BLZ to Schedule 10 accommodation without any consideration of his physical and mental disabilities and his accompanying complex care needs.

Thereafter, there was a long battle by judicial review to obtain suitable accommodation for BLZ, with several interim relief hearings and a breached court order. The facts are shocking with BLZ repeatedly accommodated in accommodation with stairs and without adequate care, leading to him suffering from seizures, falls and accidental drug overdoses.

The judicial review

One of the many points of interest about this case is that the court refused the Home Secretary’s request for the matter to be transferred to the Kings Bench Division for trial in order to resolve the factual disputes with live evidence. Instead, Fordham J resolved the factual disputes using documentary evidence. It is a useful illustration of the possibility of doing so within a judicial review claim.

The judge also made helpful comments about proceeding to hear the challenge to the policy and practice of the Home Secretary in this area despite the fact that, by the time of the final hearing, BLZ had finally been placed in adequate accommodation and therefore the matter was in that sense ‘academic’.

The legislation and policy in this area is convoluted, but in short the key issue in this case was that there is a ‘policy gap’ whereby the provision in policy concerning accommodation for asylum-seekers and failed asylum-seekers to identify care needs and make Care Act referrals to local authorities was not replicated for people in Schedule 10 accommodation. The Home Secretary conceded that the policy gap existed and eventually conceded that she had breached the public sector equality duty. Fordham J also found that it was also a breach of the reasonable adjustments duty.

Significantly, the Home Secretary also ended up conceding during the hearing that she had unlawfully failed to carry out a multi-disciplinary safe release meeting prior to the claimant’s release and unlawfully failed to make a referral to the relevant local authority for a needs assessment. Strikingly, the Home Secretary elected not to provide any direct evidence from any the caseworkers involved in the actual decision-making. Fordham J used that as a basis for drawing an adverse inference against her:

No evidence has been adduced that the caseworkers responsible for allocation of HOBA (the CAT caseworker) and Safe-Release planning (the CDT caseworker) thought about potential care and support needs or a multi-disciplinary meeting or an anticipatory referral. I find that they did not do so, and that they had no identified good reason for not doing so. The absence of evidence about the individual decision-making at the relevant time itself supports this adverse inference of fact: see VC at §§28, 68. It being necessarily implicit in DSO 08/2016 §§62-63 that caseworkers will think about potential care and support needs, about expedited multi-disciplinary meetings and about anticipatory local authority referral, the unjustified failure to think about those things was an Adherence breach. On the facts and in the circumstances of the present case, it was unreasonable – as being outside the range of reasonable responses – not to action either an expedited multi-disciplinary meeting or an anticipatory referral for a local authority care and support needs assessment; or even to consider doing so. This means that on Issues (2b) and (3a) the Claimant succeeds.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the court also identified that the Home Secretary’s decision to continue providing BLZ with accommodation with stairs despite having been warned it was unsuitable for him was a breach of her duty to provide adequate accommodation and amounted to unlawful discrimination under the Equality Act.

Conclusion

The claim against the Home Secretary was not entirely successful. The court declined to find that any of this had breached the claimant’s ECHR rights including no systemic ECHR breaches. But overall, this is a fantastic result and vindication of a long fight by BLZ’s legal team to obtain appropriate accommodation for him.

As a footnote, in BLZ No. 2, Fordham J found that the local authority was entitled to rely on the provision of Schedule 10 accommodation in order to conclude that it was not duty bound to provide accommodation under the Care Act 2014. However, unusually, Fordham J granted permission to appeal on that point himself, therefore watch this space for further developments.