Looking for CSG/2/1996

Most grateful if anyone has a copy of this decision. I have searched the internet, done a rightsnet forum search and been on the UT site too. But no luck…......

Not got it but what’s it about?

It is on Rightsnet at:
http://www.rightsnet.org.uk/pdfs/CSG296.doc

You need to be careful with that decision and others like it from that era.  The days when you could get cases thrown out by tribunals on technicalities are largely gone forever.  However they’ve not completely disappeared.  You need to read the decision alongside R(IB) 2/04

Thanks Kurt and nevip - I did look (honestly) but I will have a read of it bearing in mind it may be of a certain era before tribunals were given access to the DWP’s shoe rack.

I wanted to have a look at it because I have a case coming up at tribunal which Im annoyed about.

To keep it short - we are at a second tribunal for a case of DLA overpayment. At the first, we argued that the cl was not notified ever of a entitlement decision and on the facts taken in the hearing, the tribunal accepted this granting a decision in our favour and citing LL v SSWP 2013 UKUT 0208 in support.

DWP are using LL to come back again (as admittedly LL does say can be done) to collect the overpaid benefit. But to do this all they have done is insert an apparent “duplicate” of the notice of entitlement decision the last tribunal said on the facts was never sent.

It doesn’t seem right to me that the DWP can do this - they have not (spoiler alert) remade new entitlement and overpayment decisions; they have simply inserted a document they could have produced any time throughout the first appeal but never did (cos it didn’t even exist?!?!), and are trying to usurp the first decision. It feels like they are trying to say the first tribunal got the facts wrong and so its decision is wrong. Whereas I feel “No, the tribunal made a decision on the facts at hand and if you felt that decision was wrong you should have gone on to try it at the UT and not drummed up a duplicate of a letter which you were quiet about all through the first appeal”

That got me to thinking about those old cases where on a technical argument you could put it to the tribunal to make a decision that the DWP had not proved their case, rather than tribunal nulling it - the former kept a decision the DWP would need to go the Commissioners about, the latter removing the decision enabled them to come back again - as my limited understanding of the logic went.

Which I think is what CSG/2/1996 is going to tell me when I read it.

But I take the point that then R(IB)2/04 came along and changed the landscape.

In fact R(IB)2/04 I thought was going to come in to play at the first tribunal because the judge mentioned that although a claimant might not be notified before the tribunal, they can be notified at the tribunal (which seemed to me to be the tribunal “standing in the shoes of the decision maker” and correcting things that had gone wrong). But I pointed out LL (of 2013) and the tribunal took that onboard to be fair.

So Im stuck with going back to a different tribunal to look at a fact a previous tribunal has already decided on. Im not sure if CSG/2/1996 will help and anyway my spoiler alert may come to pass even after this second tribunal.