Council’s failure to provide accommodation to 17-year-old under Children Act provisions found to be lawful

Not quite a case for a rightsnet summary but interesting all the same.

Concerns a 17-year-old claimant who was given notice to quit her deceased mother’s council flat after she had died of a drug overdose. The claimant was not housed under Children Act provisions while under 18 but, in the end, due to delays and other intervening events, she ended up accepting accommodation under a different statutory scheme once she reached the age of 18. This meant she had lost access to the kind of support which she could have expected as a former relevant child.

The Court of Appeal (judgment of Underhill LJ at para 61) decides that the High Court below had been correct to dismiss the claimant’s appeal -

I believe that the Judge was right to uphold the reasonableness of the Council’s decision in what were an unusual set of circumstances which are unlikely to be typical of the kinds of case in which the issue of whether a child requires accommodation under section 20 arises. It is of course a pity that the fact that the Claimant did not receive section 20 accommodation means that she is not entitled to the kind of support which she could expect as a former relevant child, which I am sure would be of real value to her. But that is the result of the way Parliament has chosen to structure the relevant legislation, which inevitably leads to some arbitrary distinctions: the same result would, for example, have occurred if she had been provided with section 20 accommodation but only for a period of less than thirteen weeks before she turned 18. I should also emphasise that there is no suggestion here of the Council’s decision not to provide the Claimant with section 20 accommodation being influenced by a wish to avoid having continuing obligations to her as a former relevant child.

Judgment on bailii - DF, R (On the Application Of) v Essex County Council [2024] EWCA Civ 1545 (10 December 2024)