[2025] UKUT 98 (AAC)

RW accepts that she placed her hands on AG’s hips/waist to move him to the side, or possibly into his room.

While Mr Fullbrook suggested that RW’s “slip” when she said that she “shouldn’t have pushed, no moved him” revealed that she had in fact “pushed” AG. However, in the light of what we witnessed of RW’s clumsiness with language and her tendency to get flustered when under stress, we didn’t find this “slip” to be sinister. It was merely a clumsy way of describing the manoeuvre that she had described.

The word “push” permits of many meanings. The action that RW described could, just about, be termed a “push” in the sense that it involved the application of pressure to a part of AG to move him away from the point of application of pressure.

RW should have simply put the laundry basket down and left AG alone. She should not have touched AG at all. Notwithstanding that, and however the manoeuvre that RW performed is labelled, we are not persuaded that it involved the application of any significant or sudden force, and we are not persuaded that the action was in any way violent or aggressive.

Although we find that what RW did was contrary to her training and to good practice, we do not find that it amounts to “relevant conduct” for the purposes of the 2006 Act.

As such, we find that the DBS’s finding that RW “pushed AG with both hands in his back down the hallway, causing him to stumble” was mistaken.