Today the High Court has delivered judgment in the case of R(Logan) v. London Borough of Havering. Mr. Logan is a severely disabled resident in the borough and complained that the Council Tax Reduction Scheme (the Scheme) introduced by L B Havering for the financial year 2015/16 was discriminatory on grounds of disability and age. For the previous year, the Council had provided the severely disabled (those in receipt of e.g. Disability Living Allowance), who were on low incomes, with a 100% reduction in council tax liability, just like those over pensionable age (as required by the Council Tax Reduction Schemes (Prescribed Requirements) (England) Regulations 2012). For 2105/16, however, the Council amended the Scheme so that severely disabled persons of working age would receive a reduction of 85% only.
The High Court (Blake J) rejected Mr. Logan’s arguments that the Scheme was discriminatory, contrary to the Equality Act 2010, and in contravention of Article 14 of the European Convention on Human Rights read with Article 1 Protocol 1. The Court distinguished the case of Burnip v. Birmingham City Council [2012] LGR 954 (bedroom tax case in the private sector), holding that that case did not mean that it was “always discriminatory to expect the disabled poor to meet ordinary living expenses out of benefits that are provided because they are disabled. Council tax liability is a general charge on living expenses in the same way as any other item of expenditure that the abled bodied and disabled poor both have to make out of their subsistence budgets’. It was not, in the judge’s view, ‘a difference in treatment or an unlawful failure to treat people who are situated differently, to expect that a modest percentage of council tax support be absorbed in the subsistence budgets of the poor generally, even if the benefits forming that budget are provided because of eligibility through the disability gateway.’ The judge also found that the availability of a discretionary scheme to address exceptional hardship provided justification for any indirect difference in treatment. Mr. Logan had himself been a beneficiary of that discretionary scheme.
Blake J. did find, however, that all members of the Council had not paid proper regard to the public sector equality duty under section 149 of the Equality Act 2010. The Equality Impact Assessment (EIA) which had been produced by Council officers, and which had been seen by the Council’s Cabinet, had not been provided directly to the full Council as part of their papers for the decision on the Scheme. The judge held that the EIA ‘was adequate to enable members who read it to have due regard to the PSED, but there was insufficient evidence to indicate either that the decision makers had accessed the EIA . . . or had understood the importance of reading it in order to discharge their statutory obligation.’
Providing a cautionary tale for all local authority decisions, the judge observed that it was not sufficient to assume that because members could have accessed the EIA that they would have done so. ‘It might have been different if there was clear evidence that every decision taker had been told that they must access the [report to Cabinet] and the EIA to discharge their statutory responsibilities.’
Clive Sheldon KC, Ronnie Dennis and Zoe Gannon represented the London Borough of Havering, instructed by Stephen Doye of OneSource.
Read the judgment here.
