[2025] UKUT 74 (AAC)

The Upper Tribunal’s jurisdiction under sections 11 and 12 of the Tribunals, Courts and Enforcement Act 2007 (TCEA 2007) is to consider whether the First-tier Tribunal’s decision involved the making of an error on any point of law.

Errors of law include misunderstanding or misapplying the law, taking into account irrelevant factors or failing to take into account relevant factors. An error of fact is not an error of law unless the First-tier Tribunal’s conclusion on the facts is perverse. That is a high threshold: it means that the conclusion must be irrational or wholly unsupported by the evidence. An appeal to the Upper Tribunal is not an opportunity to re-argue the case on its merits. These principles are set out in many cases, including R (Iran) v SSHD [2005] EWCA Civ 982 at [9]-[13], per Brooke LJ.

A failure to give adequate reasons for a decision is itself an error of law. A Tribunal does not need to set out every step in their reasoning or even to deal with every point raised by the parties, but reasons will not be adequate if they do not deal with the substantial points in the case or are insufficient to enable the parties to understand why they have won or lost and any appellate tribunal to see there has been no error of law: see, eg. R(Jones) v First-tier Tribunal (Social Entitlement Chamber) [2013] UKSC 19, [2013] 2 AC 48 per Lord Hope at [25] and R (Iran) v SSHD ibid at [13]-[16]). It must also be remembered that, in some cases, reasons may be adequate even if implicit rather than explicit. As Lord Lane CJ put it in R v Immigration Appeal Tribunal, ex parte Khan [1983] QB 790 at 794, “in some cases it may be perfectly obvious [what the Tribunal is addressing its mind to] without any express reference to it by the Tribunal”.

I also bear in mind the observations of the EAT (Elias J presiding) in ASLEF v Brady [2006] IRLR 576 at [55] that an appellate tribunal must respect the factual findings of a first-tier tribunal “and should not strain to identify an error merely because it is unhappy with any factual conclusions; it should not ‘use a fine toothcomb’ to subject the reasons of the [first-tier tribunal] to unrealistically detailed scrutiny so as to find artificial defects; it is not necessary for the Tribunal to make findings on all matters of dispute before them nor to recount all the evidence, so that it cannot be assumed that the [appellate tribunal] sees all the evidence; and infelicities or even legal inaccuracies in particular sentences in the decision will not render the decision itself defective if the Tribunal has essentially properly directed itself on the relevant law.”