A profoundly unethical organisation
I would ask that people who apply to join the East Hertfordshire District Council's ("the Council") housing register due to a medical need note as follows:
The Council automatically accepts the advice of its independent medical advisor, allegedly a GP, who remains anonymous (and may not be a legitimate medical professional at all), on numerous occasions. This conduct is a flagrant departure from the Ombudsman’s guidance titled Medical assessments for housing applications, not least because said conduct flies in the face of the following:
“independence: councils should make their own decisions about medical needs, taking into account all the evidence, and not automatically accept the view of the independent medical adviser”
The Council also departed from said guidance in the following respects:
a) The Council fails to keep kept a proper record to show how it considered the evidence in the context of its allocation scheme, and how it has weighed any conflicting evidence.
b) The Council fails to make its own decision and failed to make this clear in its decision letter. For example, it should not be saying “its medical adviser has decided”. The Council nonetheless does exactly that.
c) The Council fails to properly explain its reasons for making decisions of this kind to the applicant in decision letters. In the case of a refusal, the decision letter should explain why the medical evidence the applicant provided was discounted or was not sufficient to award priority or was only sufficient to award a lower level of priority. This was not done.
Further, case law makes plain that a Council’s external medical advice cannot be considered reliable in circumstances where the medical advisor has not examined the applicant (this applies to both homelessness cases and decisions on banding priority. Indeed, there is no good reason why it should not). In Guiste v The London Borough of Lambeth [2019] EWCA Civ 1758 at [9]:
“It follows that the function of such external advice is to enable the authority "to understand the medical issues and to evaluate itself the expert evidence placed before it." In the absence of an examination of the patient, the advice "cannot itself ordinarily constitute expert evidence of the applicant's condition"".
The Council's alleged medical advisor does not examine applicants, but the Council nonetheless automatically accepts the alleged expert advice it allegedly receives, notwithstanding the fact that this practice was shown to be wrong.
It then gets worse, as the Council automatically accepts the opinion of its alleged GP over a consultant. In Shala v Birmingham City Council [2007] EWCA Civ 624 at [22]:
“It is appropriate in this light to consider the role of a practitioner such as Dr Keen. While this court in Hall v Wandsworth LBC [2005] HLR 23, §42, described his report to the local authority as constituting not merely commonsense comment but expert advice, the limited extent and character of his expertise has to be borne in mind by those using his services. As another constitution of this court pointed out in Khelassi v Brent LBC [2006] EWCA Civ 1825, §9, 22, Dr Keen is not a psychiatrist, with the result that the county court judge had been fully entitled to regard his dismissive comments on a qualified psychiatrist's report insufficiently authoritative for the local authority to rely on. In this situation a local authority weighing his comments against the report of a qualified psychiatrist must not fall into the trap of thinking that it is comparing like with like. His advice has the function of enabling the authority to understand the medical issues and to evaluate for itself the expert evidence placed before it. Absent an examination of the patient, his advice cannot itself ordinarily constitute expert evidence of the applicant's condition.”
It doesn't end there sadly.