[2024] UKUT 340 (AAC)

As Ms Cowan frankly acknowledged in her supplementary submission, “UC DMs [decision-makers] act in accordance with national operational procedures, or more local practices, that tend not to concern themselves with their statutory basis, which tends to lead to decisions that do not refer to statutory provisions or concepts.” And, one might add, such an approach also tends to lead to decisions that, if they do refer to statutory provisions or concepts at all, they often refer to the wrong ones. As a result, as another of the Secretary of State’s submission writers has observed in an earlier case, “any attempt to understand the legal nature of any given instance of ‘claim closure’ is obliged to have recourse to informed inference (or desperate guesswork)” (PP v Secretary of State for Work and Pensions [2020] UKUT 109 (AAC); [2020] AACR 25 at paragraph 8).The present appeal is a classic case in point.

Ms Cowan suggests that in the instant case there are (at least) five different ways in which the DWP decision-maker’s disallowance for the claimant’s failure to prove her identity might potentially be understood in terms of the applicable legal framework. Using her labels, they are as follows:

For those readers who are impatient for answers, I agree with Ms Cowan that Interpretation Five of this typology reflects the correct approach to questions of identity. Furthermore, my reasoning for the most part adopts Ms Cowan’s analysis