Held, claim allowed. (1) Section 5.3 of the defendant authority’s housing policy, which related to transfers requested by people who were not tenants of the authority, was significantly less advantageous to an applicant than the provision made in section 5.1 for “management transfers” by people who were existing tenants, and the authority had provided no evidence that, as a matter of discretion, it in fact operated the policy in a way that treated people from outside the borough in the same way as tenants from the borough. As the cohort affected by section 5.3 included people escaping violence (or possibly gender-based violence) who wished to have a reciprocal transfer, and as the evidence established that women were more likely to need to move borough to escape violence than men, it followed that section 5.3, by effectively excluding people who were not from the borough from a housing transfer, put women at a disadvantage compared with men and was indirectly discriminatory. In the circumstances, the claimant had suffered from that discrimination and it was not relevant that the claimant might be safe in other boroughs. Furthermore, the authority had not put any evidence or real argument forward as to how its policy, and lack of guidance in relation to that policy, was justified. Accordingly, section 5.3 of the policy was unlawful in so far as it related to women who need to move to escape violence, being indirectly discriminatory contrary to sections 19 and 29 of the Equality Act 2010 (paras 9, 10, 18, 37–39, 43–46, 48, 49, 56, 68).

(2) The authority was under a general ongoing obligation to consider its public sector equality duty (“PSED”) in section 149 of the 1020 Act, which involved a duty of inquiry. Given the existence of statutory guidance for local authorities in relation to housing allocation policies, including guidance on allocation of accommodation and domestic abuse, had the authority considered its PSED on any of the multiple occasions in recent years in which guidance had been issued centrally, or when it reviewed its policy, then it would have had evidence of such consideration readily to hand. In the absence of any such evidence, together with the absence on the face of the policy of any consideration of the PSED duty or recent guidance, the proper conclusion was that the authority had not had regard to the factors to which it ought to have had regard in relation to the policy and therefore it had not complied with its PSED and the policy was unlawful for that reason also (paras 31–34).

(3) Where the authority’s decision referred only to the “demand from priority groups” and to “rehousing [the claimant] over 10 years out of turn”, the clear implication was that the decision-maker had considered the long list of people on the housing ladder and decided that as a matter of principle “queue jumping” was not permissible. There was no evidence that the authority had considered the situation of the claimant’s child when assessing her application. Accordingly, the claimant had shown that the authority had breached section 11 of the Children Act 2004 and had failed to ensure that its functions were discharged having regard to the need to safeguard and promote the welfare of children. For all the foregoing reasons, the decision in the claimant’s case had been made unlawfully (paras 58–60, 71).