[2025] UKUT 181 (AAC)

In considerable measure, grounds 1 and 2 overlap, as both counsel accepted in their submissions.

As I explained in paragraph 141 above, this is not a case (unlike MM and JA) where the Applicant was ignorant of the 2012 Scheme. He knew of the Scheme and had claimed under it in relation to the stabbing injury. I do not therefore need to consider further the position if he had not known of the existence of the Scheme at all, although were it necessary I would have adopted the submissions made by Mr Moretto in paragraphs 73 to 81 above.

Instead the “exceptional circumstances” relied upon by the Applicant was that he did not know that he was the victim of a crime at the hands of his partner.

The short point is that whether the Tribunal accepted that case or not was a matter for it and it alone. It rejected that case and did so rationally, as explained in paragraph [15] of its decision. Having set out his case that he did not appreciate that what he was enduring by way of domestic abuse was a crime until much later, it added (with emphasis added):

“We can accept that up to a point but the difficulty for the Appellant is that he reported a crime of domestic violence to the police in August 2016, some three months after it ended. It is simply not reasonably possible for the Appellant to claim he was unaware that he was the victim of crime after reporting it to the police. In our assessment we thought that the Appellant knew he was a victim of crime when he reported it to the police”.

Indeed, as the police report in 2019, referring back to the incidents of abuse leading up to 2016, states

“The applicant reports and was interviewed stating that he was assaulted and abused on numerous occasions by the assailant, his property was damaged”.

He had reported the matter to his therapist in July 2016 and she persuaded him to report it to Victim Support, which he accepted was a charity dedicated to supporting people affected by crime and traumatic incidents. They persuaded him to report the abuse to the police and he did so on 28 July 2016 and was interviewed by the police in August. Mr Mandagere accepted that a police report had been made in 2016, although it was no longer extant and was not in the bundle.

The short point is simply this: if he did not believe that the abuse which he had suffered was a crime, why was he reporting it to the police at all? When I put that point to Mr Mandagere I did not receive a convincing answer.

In those circumstances, it was wholly permissible for the Tribunal to reject the Applicant’s case that he did not believe that he was the victim of a crime. It was rational to reject as not credible the assertion that the Applicant reported the domestic abuse to the police not because he thought it was a crime, but because he wanted support. That, as Mr Moretto rightly submitted, is the end of the matter.

As to the alternative argument made by Mr Mandagere that, even if the Applicant knew that a crime had been committed (which was not in fact his case), he did not know that compensation could be awarded for it, the Tribunal rejected that argument at [16] on the basis that it was “entirely possible that at any point from August 2016 down to October 2019 when the claim was made, the Appellant might have easily been able to find out about domestic abuse and its place within the scheme”.

I agree with Mr Moretto that that finding was one which the Tribunal was entitled to reach. He had made a claim for a different crime of violence in August 2016, so he was plainly well aware that there was a compensation scheme for victims of crime – as the very name of the Scheme makes abundantly clear. He could have obtained a copy of the Scheme to find out more about it or sought advice about it. The Tribunal’s reasoning in that respect was entirely permissible and indeed unassailable.

Essentially Mr Mandagere was driven to submit that the Applicant did not know the details of the Scheme in the sense that he did not know that the abuse which he had suffered was within the term of the Scheme, but that as Mr Moretto submitted was the case with every applicant. No applicant will be conversant with the fine detail of the Scheme. Knowing that there is a scheme to compensate victims of crime, but not knowing the details of the Scheme, is not on these facts an exceptional circumstance which could allow for the discretion to extend time. “Exceptional circumstances” must exclude those which are “routinely or regularly encountered”, as Mr Mandagere accepted. No applicant will know of the precise details of the Scheme: there is no basis on these facts in which it could be said that that would amount to exceptional circumstances such as to permit the Tribunal to extend time.

As to the allegation that there was unfairness in the Tribunal’s decision because it made findings which were not put to the Applicant, his case was that he did not know that a crime had been committed on him. That, however, was clearly addressed with him in detail in his evidence as Mr Moretto set out in paragraph 73 above.

“M: Can you speak to the tribunal why you didn’t raise the abuse issues back then?

MF: I wasn’t aware I was undergoing domestic abuse. Simple. Simply, and I wasn’t aware at all until much later”

...

“I wasn’t even aware that domestic abuse, that the domestic abuse, was a crime and that I was undergoing a crime, I didn’t even know that compensation would be covered”

...

“Judge: Are you saying that the first that you became aware that domestic abuse is a criminal offence is in October 2019 when you made the application?

MF: Yes”

The point was fairly put to the Applicant; the Tribunal simply did not accept what he said.

Mr Mandagere also submitted that the Tribunal in this case had essentially adopted the impermissible reasoning of the First-tier Tribunal in JA. But that is precisely what it did not do.

The Tribunal in JA had adopted the impermissible reasoning that “17(m) Of course ignorance is no defence and no excuse for delay” (although of course the decision in JA postdated the decision of the Tribunal in this case). By contrast, the Tribunal here certainly had MM before it and had it cited to it by Mr Mandagere, as is apparent from the transcript of the hearing. What the Tribunal very carefully did in paragraph [11] of its decision was to set out Mr Mandagere’s submissions and specifically to cite an extract from MM at [45] in the course of that paragraph.