Does anyone know whether this is the date the decision was made, or the date the decision was notified? In my case, there is a gap of 4 days.

My appellant had a fall exactly on the day the decision was made, so presumably that could be taken into account either way?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

The commentary on this section takes it for granted that the time of the decision means what it says, and the date on which it is communicated is a red herring.

You could get into lovely, Jesuitical intricacies about what time of day the decision was made and the change of circumstance occurred - I can see no case law on that, and I doubt that the time of the decision is recorded (I could be wrong). But it is probably made in normal office hours and so if your change happens at five o-clock in the morning or ten at night you can probably make an educated guess....

I don’t think anything turns on the meaning of the word”made” in this section. The policy intention is clear and that is to prevent tribunals taking into account circumstances not obtaining at the time of “the decision under appeal” as opposed to down to the date of the hearing.

The decision under appeal, in my view, runs from the dater it is notified (sent out as opposed to received) to the claimant and not from the date it was administratively recorded.

In R (Anufrijeva) V Secretary of State for the Home Department and Another the House of Lords made it clear that unless parliament has clearly legislated to contrary effect “notice of a decision is required before it can have the character of a determination with legal effect because the individual concerned must be in a position to challenge the decision in the courts if he or she wishes to do so. This is not a technical rule. It is simply an application of the right of access to justice. That is a fundamental and constitutional principle of our legal system”.

Thus, in my view, the date of the decision under appeal is the date on the decision notice sent to the claimant. This is illustrated in actual practice quite often in ICB cases where a person fails the medical but does not have the decision of non-entitlement to ICB notified to him weeks, sometimes months, later but carries on receiving ICB until the date of the decision notice.