Worcestershire County Council, R (on the application of) v Secretary of State for Health and Social Care [2023] UKSC 31 (10 August 2023)
Citation: Worcestershire County Council, R (on the application of) v Secretary of State for Health and Social Care [2023] UKSC 31 (10 August 2023)
Rule of thumb: Stare-decisis: If a person is sectioned, what local authority is responsible for paying the private care costs if they are put in a hospital? The place where a person is ‘ordinarily resident’ is the Council who has to pay – this means that if a sectioned person is transferred to a care-home outside of the local authority area, the original local authority liable to pay this unless the person then needs sectioned again to get their medicine dose increased – if they are sectioned again it is the new local authority area they reside who has to take over the private care home costs.
Background facts: The basic facts of this case were that a woman by the name of SG was sectioned & hospitalised in Worcestershire. Once JG was stabilised, it was decided by health & legal professionals in Worcestershire that it would be best for SG to be transferred to a private care-home in Swindon as her daughter lived there. Worcestershire Council agreed to pay for the costs for JG to stay in the private care-home in Swindon.
JG stayed in the 1st Swindon private care-home for a while, but JG was struggling to adapt to the environment there, so she was transferred to a second Swindon private care-home, which Worcestershire Council agreed to pay for. JG struggled to adapt in the 2nd Swindon care-home, by which point she had been living in Swindon for 11 months, so she was eventually sectioned once again.
Once JG was stabilised in hospital, there was a dispute between Swindon & Worcestershire Councils as to who was responsible for paying for JG’s private care-home costs from that point on.
Parties argued: The relevant statutory provision basically stated that where a person is ‘ordinarily resident’ at the time of being sectioned is responsible for the costs of ‘after care’ to a private care home. The parties disputed what ‘ordinary resident’ meant and it came down to a statutory interpretation of this section & whether 11 months met the ‘ordinary resident’ test.
Court held: The Court affirmed that if a person has been living full-time in a place for 11 months ‘ordinarily resident’ is met. In short, Worcestershire Council no longer had to pay the care costs, and Swindon Council had to pay for the care costs from that point on as JG had been living there full-time for 11 months.
Ratio-decidendi:
4. ‘The key statutory provisions which are in issue in this case are subsections (1), (2), (3) and (6) of section 117 of the 1983 Act. These provide:
“117 After Care… (3) In this section ‘the clinical commissioning group or Local Health Board’ means the clinical commissioning group or Local Health Board, and ‘the local social services authority’ means the local social services authority — (a) if, immediately before being detained, the person concerned was ordinarily resident in England, for the area in England in which he was ordinarily resident; (b) if, immediately before being detained, the person concerned was ordinarily resident in Wales, for the area in Wales in which he was ordinarily resident; or (c) in any other case for the area in which the person concerned is resident or to which he is sent on discharge by the hospital in which he was detained…
18. The Secretary of State decided that JG was ordinarily resident in Swindon immediately before the second detention and that, in these circumstances, Swindon was responsible under section 117 for her after-care following the second discharge. This decision reflected guidance issued by the Secretary of State under section 78 of the 2014 Act. Paragraph 19.64 of the current version of this care and support statutory guidance, issued in 2016, states:
“Under section 117 of the 1983 Act, as amended by the Care Act 2014, if a person is ordinarily resident in local authority area (A) immediately before detention under the 1983 Act, and moves on discharge to local authority area (B) …, local authority (A) will remain responsible for providing or commissioning their after-care. However, if the patient, having become ordinarily resident after discharge in local authority area (B) or (C), is subsequently detained in hospital for treatment again, the local authority in whose area the person was ordinarily resident immediately before their subsequent admission (local authority (B) or (C)) will be responsible for their after-care when they are discharged from hospital.”…
‘86. … that the two relevant statutory regimes each contained a deeming (or disregarding) provision intended to achieve exactly the same effect. Far from being otiose, their existence was therefore critical. The significance of section 39(4) is in confirming that, unlike the rules in the adult social care legislation and the CA 1989, the ordinary residence rules in the 2014 Act and section 117 of the 1983 Act are not congruent with each other, so that a specific provision is needed to align them where they interact.
87. We conclude that the courts below were right to decide that, in circumstances where Parliament has deliberately chosen not to apply a deeming (or equivalent) provision to the determination of ordinary residence under section 117 of the 1983 Act, the words “is ordinarily resident” must be given their usual meaning, so that JG was ordinarily resident in Swindon immediately before the second detention’.
Lord Hamblen
Warning: This is not professional legal advice. This is not professional legal education advice. Please obtain professional guidance before embarking on any legal course of action. This is just an interpretation of a Judgment by persons of legal insight & varying levels of legal specialism, experience & expertise. Please read the Judgment yourself and form your own interpretation of it with professional assistance.