Practical Law

Make sure that you have not missed a key development in your area of the law by reading our In brief review of the latest Practical Law Local Government email.

Adult social services:

• The High Court has quashed a council’s refusal to accommodate an individual under the provisions of the Care Act 2014 (R(SG) v London Borough of Hackney).
• The Court of Protection has declined to vary or alter the principle behind an order requiring an NHS Trust to provide a report on capacity under section 49 of the Mental Capacity Act 2005, although it acknowledged that the order placed a burden on the limited resources of the Trust (RS v LCC).

Children’s services:

• The European Court of Human Rights has held that the Republic of Croatia had breached a child’s Article 3 and 8 rights because of the delay to the criminal proceedings concerning the father’s assault on the child and the lack of representation of the child’s wishes and feelings in the proceedings (M and M v Croatia).
• The Family Court has considered whether a local authority’s parental responsibility for a looked after child includes an overriding refusal to the child being circumcised for religious reasons (Re A (A Child)).

Commercial:

• The UK Regulators Network has published a second report on understanding affordability pressures in essential services. This report focuses on future affordability pressures, and examines the contributory factors which may affect future bills and fares for essential services across the energy, water, communications and rail sectors.

Education:

• The House of Commons Library has published a revised briefing paper on the Education and Adoption Bill 2015-16. The revisions to the briefing paper reflect the Bill’s second reading and the Commons’ committee stages.

Employment and pensions:

• The ECJ has held that the time spent by workers who do not have a fixed or habitual place of work, on travelling each day between their homes and the premises of the first and last customers designated by their employer is “working time” for the purposes of the Working Time Directive (Federacion de Servicios Privados del sindicato Comisiones Obreras v Tyco Integrated Security SL and another).
• The EAT has:
  • found that an employee who had been off work for six years and had no prospect of returning to work was not “assigned” to an organised grouping for TUPE purposes (BT Managed Services Ltd v Edwards and another); and
  • set aside a tribunal’s decision that the dismissal of a disabled employee for gross misconduct following disability-related sickness absence was not discrimination arising from disability under section 15 of the Equality Act 2010 (Hall v Chief Constable of West Yorkshire Police).

Local government law:

• The Welsh Government has published a consultation on draft statutory guidance on how the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015 will affect public bodies.

Property and planning:

• The Assured Shorthold Tenancy Notices and Prescribed Requirements (England) Regulations 2015 have been laid before Parliament and will come into force on 1 October 2015.
• The High Court has:
  • decided that an external mural, attributed to a famous street artist, which had been removed by the tenant, in fact belonged to the landlord (The Creative Foundation v Dreamland Leisure Ltd and others); and
  • considered the requirements for a compelling case in the public interest to justify a compulsory purchase order (Horada v Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government).

Public procurement:

• The Procurement Reform (Scotland) Act 2014 (Commencement No 1) Order 2015 has been  published. The order brings into force on 28 September 2015 section 29 of the Procurement Reform (Scotland) Act 2014 which gives the Scottish Ministers the power to publish guidance about the selection of economic operators and the award of contracts in relation to procurements regulated under the Act.
• The General Court has dismissed an action challenging a decision of the Court of Justice of the European Union that effectively eliminated the claimant from the list of approved subcontractors to be included in a bid by IDEST Communication SA for framework contracts for the translation of legal texts from certain official languages of the European Union into French (Alain Laurent Brouillard v Court of Justice of the European Union).