[2025] UKUT 221 (AAC)

Mr Serr’s closing submissions at the hearing of this appeal argued that the Appellant’s evidence was contradictory and fanciful, and the Upper Tribunal should reject it. He takes no responsibility for sleeping on duty at Home 1, denies being told to keep the door open at Home 2, blames management for not having seen care plans, blames another staff member for not reporting the earlier incident at Home 2, blames his employer for not having a pen and the managers of Home 2 for weak safeguarding policies and practices. The Appellant denies everything and ‘doubles down’ on his excuses when flaws in his initial attempts to evade responsibility become apparent.

Mr Serr argues that no reasonable tribunal could accept the Appellant’s version of events at Home 1, which is riddled with contradictions. Were the lights in the lounge on or off? Was the TV on or off? Was TE mistaken that the Appellant was asleep, or did she know he was praying and, for some unknown reason, decide to fabricate an allegation that he was asleep? Was the doorbell faulty or just inherently quiet? Why did the Appellant fail to hear a doorbell that woke the sleeping staff member? Why would the doorbell be clearly audible in the lounge in the daytime, according to the manager’s test, yet inaudible to the Appellant in the quietness of night? Nothing really hangs together in the Appellant’s account, and he consistently seeks to distance himself from written notes of an informal conversation and interview that he himself signed whenever something in those notes is inconvenient.

In reality, submits Mr Serr, the Appellant is an experienced and trained carer. He was in charge of a small number of vulnerable children / young people at night. At Home 1, he fell asleep leaving a vulnerable young person outside alone. The Appellant never pursued seeing the care plans of vulnerable young people in his care. Even if he did only interact with the manager of Home 2 in the car park (itself uncorroborated by any other evidence), that did not prevent him from raising the care plan issue. The Appellant knew about the sexual vulnerability of the young people in Home 2, which was why he was instructed to keep the office door open at night and it is obvious that children cannot properly be supervised from behind a closed door. The Appellant’s account of a ‘no lights’ policy which required the door to be kept shut is fanciful. The Appellant did the exact opposite of what was required at Home 2 in order to prioritise his own needs. He had recently witnessed a disturbing incident at Home 2 but made no record of it, an incident that may well have been a precursor to what happened on the night of 6/7 November 2020. He kept no records at all that night.

Mr Serr argues that a thread running through this case is the Appellant’s failure to take seriously the safeguarding needs of vulnerable children / young people. The Appellant demonstrates no error of law or fact in DBS’ barring decisions. DBS accept the significant consequences of barring for this Appellant, but priority must be given to the needs of children and vulnerable adults. On the facts as contended by DBS, barring the Appellant from the children’s and vulnerable adults’ workforces has to be considered a proportionate response.