Once the Local Authorities and Police and Crime Panels (Coronavirus) (Flexibility of Local Authority and Police and Crime Panel Meetings) (England and Wales) Regulations 2020, SI 2020/392, which permitted local authority meetings to be held remotely (in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic), ceased to apply, such meetings had to take place at a single, specified geographical location; attending a meeting at such a location meant physically going to it; and being ‘present’ at such a meeting involved physical presence at that location. Accordingly, the Administrative Court, in dismissing a judicial review claim, ruled that Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government had been correct, in November 2016 and July 2019, to say that primary legislation would be required to allow local authority ‘meetings’ under the Local Government Act 1972 to take place remotely. The court considered that it was unlikely that Parliament had intended an updating construction to a
Dame Victoria Sharp P and Chamberlain J
22 January 2021
Mental health – Detention – Meaning of ‘personally seen’ and ‘personally examined’ in context of detention of persons with mental disorders during coronavirus pandemic
The applicant NHS Trust (the Trust) was the body responsible in its area for the employment and provision of medical practitioners whose recommendations were required by the Mental Health Act 1983 (MHA 1983) for the detention or reception into guardianship of patients suffering from mental disorders.
MHA 1983 made it a legal requirement that doctors had to ‘personally examine’ a person before recommending that they be detained, and that an approved mental health professional (AMHP) had to have ‘personally seen’ the person before applying for a detention. However, in the context of the Coronavirus pandemic, and just after the start of the first ‘lockdown’, on 30 March 2020, NHS England issued a document entitled Legal guidance for
The applicants, who had all been arrested pursuant to European Arrest Warrants (EAWs) before 31 December 2020, failed in their applications for writs of habeas corpus. Their applications had been made on a single common ground: that, since 11 pm on 31 December 2020, the end of the transition period defined by the Agreement on the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the EU and Euratom, there was no longer any legal basis in international law for their surrender; and that in consequence there was no basis in domestic law for continued detention or for the maintenance of bail conditions. In dismissing their applications, the Administrative Court held, among other things, that the argument in support of the applications was misconceived: as a matter of constitutional principle, the correct starting point for the legal analysis was the Act of Parliament which governed extradition, namely the Extradition Act 2003 and the domestic law which modified it, not Framework Decision 2002/584 JHA