The claimant, a Bangladeshi national, entered the United Kingdom to join her husband but the relationship subsequently broke down. The claimant left home and was accommodated on a temporary basis in a refuge run by a charity which supported women and children who had been affected by domestic violence and abuse. She was granted limited leave to remain (“LLTR”) for three months under the Destitute Domestic Violence Concession operated by the Secretary of State for the Home Department under Appendix FM to the Immigration Rules, with limited access to public funds to enable her to leave the relationship and apply for domestic violence-linked indefinite leave to remain. She received a formal endorsement of her LLTR in the form of a biometric residence permit and her eligibility for universal credit was confirmed subject to the allocation of a national insurance number. There were administrative delays in allocating the number while the claimant’s identity was verified and accurate contact details confirmed. Once the national insurance number was allocated, the claimant received her first payment of universal credit on the same day, nearly six weeks after she had first applied for it. The claimant sought judicial review challenging the failure of the Secretary of State to provide a national insurance number printed on her biometric residence permit, on the day she was granted leave to remain, as being unlawfully discriminatory contrary to article 14 of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, read with article 8 and article 1 of the First Protocol to the Convention, when the claimant’s position was compared with that others who, under the National Insurance Number Alignment Scheme, were allocated national insurance numbers at the same time as the grant of leave to enter or remain, namely: (i) skilled workers under part 9 of the Skilled Worker appendix to the Immigration Rules, which enabled employers to recruit people to whom they had made a job offer in an eligible skilled occupation from a Home Office-approved sponsor; and (ii) those who were granted leave to enter or remain under the protection categories of the Immigration Rules, such as refugees, and their dependants.
On the claim for judicial review—
Held, claim dismissed. The claimant had not been the subject of any barrier to the payment of universal credit which had not been anticipated in the relevant legislation, which she did not challenge as being incompatible with her human rights. The focus of her claim instead concerned only the way in which her application for a national insurance number, which had no statutory criteria governing its allocation, had been administered. The allocation of national insurance numbers had no more than a tenuous link with the core values which article 8 of, and article 1 of the First Protocol to, the Human Rights Convention sought to protect. The process of allocation might, like any other administrative process, be subject to human error whether by a claimant or by the Government and, while that might bring delay, it did not strike at any values which either article 1 of the First Protocol or article 8 sought to protect. Even if the delay in the present case, caused by the fact that the claimant could not be contacted for a period, had been entirely the responsibility of the Government, which it had not, neither the administration of national insurance numbers nor any part of the allocation process could be regarded as falling withing the ambit of a substantive article of the Convention for the purposes of advancing a claim of unlawful discrimination under article 14. In any event, where applicants under the Destitute Domestic Violence Concession cohort were prioritised for the speedy allocation of national insurance numbers, any residual delay did not amount to a material difference in treatment when compared with the other groups identified by the claimant. Moreover the exclusion of the that cohort from the National Insurance Number Alignment Scheme had cogent justification linked to the public interests both in immigration control and in ensuring the fair and humane treatment of all those who claimed social security benefits, so that those who were entitled to them received the m without undue delay, bearing in mind that seeking to prioritise a large number of national insurance number allocations was resource-intensive and would be detrimental to those who did not benefit from any form of prioritisation (paras 26, 69, 73, 74, 76–78, 91, 104, 105, 135, 138).
Zoë Leventhal KC and Darryl Hutcheon (instructed by Central England Law Centre, Birmingham) for the claimant.
Edward Brown KC and Talia Zybutz (instructed by Treasury Solicitor) for the Secretary of State.