[2024] UKUT 4 (AAC)

I decide that the First-tier Tribunal’s decision involved an error on a point of law. The Tribunal’s reasons for its decision recorded that the Appellant’s wife attended the hearing but made no mention of her giving evidence. From those reasons, the Appellant could not know whether his wife’s evidence was accepted or rejected and, if rejected, why. The Tribunal’s failure to deal with the Appellant’s wife’s evidence meant that its decision involved an error on a point of law.

In this case, the First-tier Tribunal judge who presided over the hearing of the Appellant’s appeal to that tribunal also determined the Appellant’s application for permission to appeal to the Upper Tribunal. For this purpose, the judge acted alone. As described above, the judge’s reasons for refusing permission included reasons for rejecting the Appellant’s wife’s evidence given at the hearing before the First-tier Tribunal. Since the reasons given for the Tribunal’s dismissal of the appeal made no mention of the wife’s evidence, I cannot be certain that the reasons given by the judge at the permission stage were, in fact, the reasons of the panel that dismissed the appeal (the panel consisted of the judge and a medical member). Moreover, the reasons given at the permission stage fall foul of Bancoult. They were essentially new reasons that formed no part of the Tribunal’s earlier explanation of why it dismissed the Appellant’s appeal against the Secretary of State’s decision.

I set aside the First-tier Tribunal’s decision and remit this case to that Tribunal for re-determination by a differently constituted panel, in accordance with the directions given above.