Local government

Community care services - duty to provide suitable accommodation - local authority obliged to meet assess and meet needs rather than preferences R (Khana) v Southwark London Borough Council: CA (Lords Justice Henry and Mance and Mr Justice McKinnon): 28 June 2001The applicant was an Iraqi woman aged 91 with impaired sight and hearing who suffered from paranoid schizophrenia as well as restricted mobility owing to her physical infirmity.

In response to her application for suitable accommodation under the National Assistance Act 1948 and the National Health Service and Community Care Act 1990, the local authority assessed her needs and offered her a place in a residential home as the only place where her needs could be met.The applicant sought judicial review of that decision on the ground, in effect, that the local authority should have exercised its powers so as to provide her with a two-bedroom ground floor flat where she could live with and be cared for by her extended family speaking her own language.

Mr Justice Hallett refused her application.

She appealed.Richard Drabble QC and Fenella Morris (instructed by Pierce Glynn) for the applicant; Hilton Harrop-Griffths (instructed by Borough Solicitor, Southwark London Borough Council) for the local authority.Held, dismissing the appeal, that where a local authority had concluded that the only way to meet the applicant's needs was to offer her a full-time place in a residential home and where that conclusion and the reasonableness of the offer could not be challenged as such, the local authority had satisfied its duty under the legislation; that the local authority was required to assess and meet needs, not to satisfy preferences for or insistence upon new accommodation which would meet only some and not all of a person's needs.