Court of Appeal has today (18 April) held that Human Rights Act damages may be awarded to people who faced an imminent prospect of inhuman or degrading treatment as a result of the Home Office policy of “no recourse to public funds” ASY and Others v SSHD

Alex Goodman KC was instructed by Deighton Peirce Glynn in this latest chapter of a long-running sequence of cases challenging the “no recourse to public funds” policy.

The Claimants in this case were all single mothers with limited leave to remain (“LLTR”) in the UK. Each Claimant had at least one British citizen child and faced financial difficulties which meant they were unable to meet their children’s essential living needs and/or their accommodation was not adequate. They were ineligible for benefits because the Home Office imposed a condition on the mother’s LLTR prohibiting access to public funds, under a policy which was declared unlawful by the Divisional Court in R (W) v SSHD [2020] 1 WLR 4420 because it breached Article 3 of the ECHR by requiring individuals to become destitute before the Home Office would remove the NRPF condition.

After prolonged delays, the Home Office accepted that each Claimant in this case was destitute and should therefore be permitted to have recourse to public funds, but each family had endured several weeks (and in some cases months) of destitution before that decision was made.

The Court of Appeal has held that “the Claimants have a right to damages for breach of their rights under Article 3 ECHR if, as a result of the conditions imposed upon them by the Home Office of having no recourse to public funds:

(a) they have suffered inhuman and degrading treatment; or

(b) they have been at immediate risk of inhuman and degrading treatment; have notified the Home Office of this by making a CoC claim; have not had a positive and prompt response to that claim; and have suffered severe distress during the period before the claim is resolved.”

The judgement can be found here.