[2025] UKUT 153 (AAC)

Descriptor (a) is, as with all the activities, the non-scoring descriptor: the baseline ability to accomplish the activity unaided.

Under descriptor (b) the use of an aid or appliance is needed “to be able to wash or bathe.” I will return to that.

Under (c) there must be a need for supervision or prompting.

The following three descriptors, (d) (e) and (f), refer to the need for assistance either in washing hair or different body areas, or in getting in or out of a bath or shower.

The use of the word “assistance” is, in my judgment, important in the interpretation of Activity 4. It refers to physical intervention from another person with the functional aspects of washing, or getting in or out of a bath or shower.

The final descriptor, (g), deals with the position where a claimant “Cannot wash and bathe at all and needs another person to wash their entire body.”

I pause here to observe that Secretary of State v GP [2016] UKUT 444 (AAC) (from now, GP), upon which Mr Kamara relies, is not an authority as to the meaning of Activity 4 (g). The Secretary of State’s grounds of appeal, upon which permission had been granted, were not as to the proper application of the descriptor, but that the FTT had been inconsistent in its approach by awarding the maximum points for Activity 4 while retaining the departmental decision of two points in other Activities where the same argument, an underscoring of the effects of obsessional compulsive disorder, had been put forward for the appellant. The ratio of the Upper Tribunal decision was that there was no inconsistency, because where the maximum points for an enhanced award were met the tribunal need not look for further points (although pragmatically, it ought to explain why it had stopped counting). That case cannot assist on a point of construction, but I consider that aspect now: I did not in GP.

The specificity of the words in the final descriptor, “Cannot wash and bathe at all and needs another person to wash their entire body” is unusual in the context of the other activities in the Schedule, and that need for physical assistance from another person with washing or entering/exiting a bath or shower is adumbrated in the previous three descriptors. Together they plainly set out a concept that was meant to be there, and reinforce that this is a test of functional ability, and not outcome.