A dispute between four local authorities over which of them must fund the lifelong care of a severely disabled young man has yielded authoritative guidance from the Court of Appeal on the vexed issue of exactly what constitutes a person’s ‘ordinary residence’.
Cornwall, Wiltshire, Somerset and South Gloucestershire Councils had all denied responsibility for the 27-year-old man (P), who has been stricken with a number of grave disabilities since birth, cannot speak and needs around-the-clock care. The cost of looking after him was currently around £80,000 a year and, compounded over his lifetime, that would produce a total bill running into millions of pounds.
Having been born in Wiltshire, P was placed when very young with foster parents in South Gloucestershire with whom he lived for 13 years. Meanwhile, his parents had moved to Cornwall with his siblings but continued to visit him regularly. Since leaving his foster parents’ home in his late teens, he had been looked after in a residential care home in Somerset.
In an attempt to settle the dispute, the Department of Health decided that P was ordinarily resident in Cornwall, because that was where his parents lived. Cornwall Council’s judicial review challenge to that decision was subsequently dismissed by the High Court.
However, in allowing Cornwall’s appeal, the Court of Appeal ruled that it defied common sense to
describe P as ordinarily resident in a county which he had only ever visited for the very occasional holiday with his natural family. He had lived day-to-day for most of his childhood with his foster parents in South Gloucestershire and it was there that ‘the centre or focus of his social and family environment’ lay.
P had a close bond with both his natural and foster parents and the Court noted that the question of his ordinary residence was ‘highly problematic’. The judge observed: “Human beings have the inconvenient habit of conducting their lives without regard to legal categories.”
Ruling that South Gloucestershire must ‘foot the not inconsiderable bill’ for P’s care, the judge concluded: “Where a vulnerable adult like P has, as a matter of fact, been living in one place and one place only for many years, that will almost inevitably compel the conclusion that it is his ordinary place of residence. It is not legitimate to avoid that common sense conclusion by the application of an artificial rule which effectively gives no weight to the fact of residence at all.”