[2024] UKUT 311 (AAC)

Error in failing to take sufficient account of, and to give sufficient weight to, Dr Alachkar’s first two reports

The First-tier Tribunal erred in law in failing to take sufficient account of, and to give sufficient weight to, Dr Alachkar’s first two reports.

The First-tier Tribunal found—

“[Dr Alachkar] found no evidence of severely depressed mood but rather attributed symptoms to Covid lockdown (C249); this letter was in July 2020 which was after the date the Appellant submitted the claim to CICA” (paragraph 46, written reasons).

This ignored what Dr Alachkar had said in his two previous reports.

In his report dated 29 January 2018 (Footnote: ²) (pages C259 to C262), Dr Alachkar had reported that—

“she has actually been ‘an [redacted] wreck’ since her teenage years and that she spent a lot of her time in bed and had no social life between the ages of 13 and 16” (page C260, third paragraph);

“I do wonder if [Ms H] struggled with framing her [redacted] as [redacted] to [redacted] and [redacted] health and not only as physical health problems” (page C261 seventh paragraph); and

“She was not comfortable talking about her background” (page C260, final paragraph).

The redactions made to the second of those three passages made that passage perhaps difficult to understand. But it appears at least that Dr Alachkar was talking about Ms H’s struggle with accepting that she has any mental health problems, and perhaps that she also has a struggle with accepting that they may be due to the background that she had difficulty talking to him about. Dr Alachkar said in that report that he had seen Ms H three times in January 2019. So he saw her before she made her criminal injuries compensation claim on 13 September 2019. It was he who suggested that she had mental health problems, not her. This first report from Dr Alachkar suggests that Ms H has not fabricated her mental ill-health, or its causes, for the purposes of her criminal injuries compensation claim.

In his second report, dated 18 November 2019 (from a clinic of 28 October 2019), Dr Alachkar said (page C252)—

“she directed a lot of that anger towards me for suggesting that her current [redacted] might be [redacted] to her past”.

This suggested: (i) that, far from making up that the abuse was the cause of her problems, Ms H had originally been resistant to the idea and did not make up that proposition herself; and (ii) that she did not make it up only after or for the purposes of the criminal injuries compensation claim; someone else – qualified to do so (Dr Alachkar) – had already suspected that it was already there.

Moreover, if the First-tier Tribunal had felt hindered by the redactions in Dr Alachkar’s first two reports, that tribunal should have asked Ms H whether she could provide unredacted versions. Ms H told me she would have been able to do that – whether before or at the hearing – within five minutes of being asked, had the First-tier Tribunal asked.