The papers for my client's appeal against a PCA decision contain an unhelpful IB113 report from her GP. All references to the name of the GP who completed the report have been crudely scribbled out, although the address of the surgery (which is a group practice)is still legible.

My client says she has a long-running dispute with her GP on another matter and she is certain that the name of the GP has been obliterated simply to prevent her having grounds to make a complaint against an individual doctor at the surgery (having regard to the unhelpful nature of the report).

Is there an argument that a report that has been anonymised in this way is inadmissible as evidence (bearing in mind that the surgery address has not been obscured)?

You could easily argue at tribunal that the evidence should be ignored but do not really see how, in itself, that it helps much.

Your priority is to dispute the ubhelpful PCA.

If you have good supportive medical evidence to contradict the PCA - it should not take too much effort to rubbish an anonymous report. However if you do not have good supporting evidence the tribunal only needs to rely on the PCA and the anonymous report would be irrelevant.

Have you tried writing to the surgery enclosing a copy of the unhelpful GP report and asking, based on the handwriting, which GP completed it?

I've had unhelpful reports from GP surgeries before where we've successfully argued that they should not be relied upon because the client doesn't generally see that particular doctor.

We also had a report all but ignored once because the client was in dispute with the Doctor that had written the report - in that case our client changed Doctors which proved the point.