Background
Patrick Asiimwe suffered a serious acquired brain injury from a stroke in 2018, leaving him with memory impairment, sight loss, and mobility difficulties requiring ongoing specialist rehabilitation at St Thomas’ Hospital, London. After becoming homeless, he applied to the London Borough of Lambeth for housing in October 2021. Although Lambeth accepted it owed him the interim housing duty under section 188(1) of the Housing Act 1996, it provided no temporary accommodation for three months. When accommodation was eventually offered in January 2022, it was in North Finchley — neither within Lambeth Borough nor within the 30-minute public transport commute of St Thomas’ Hospital that Lambeth’s own needs assessment had identified as essential.
Lambeth accepted the full housing duty in February 2022 but left Asiimwe in the unsuitable North Finchley property. His November 2022 request for a suitability re-assessment went unanswered for seven months. He ultimately received suitable social housing within Lambeth in September 2023, only after issuing judicial review proceedings. The reasonable adjustments claim under the Equality Act 2010 was transferred to the Central London County Court, where HHJ Bloom dismissed it in April 2025, finding that while Lambeth’s practice of placing 70% of applicants in out-of-borough temporary accommodation was a PCP causing substantial disadvantage to disabled persons with caring needs, Lambeth’s Housing Placements Policy and transfer list constituted reasonable systemic adjustments. The judge characterised the failures in Asiimwe’s specific case as mere “ad hoc individual” failures that could not give rise to a breach of the systemic duty.
Permission to appeal was granted by Coppel J in February 2026. The Claimant advanced two grounds: first, that the county court erred in treating individual failures as incapable of constituting a breach of the duty to make reasonable adjustments under section 20 of the Equality Act 2010; and second, that the court below had failed to apply the reverse burden of proof under section 136(2)–(3) of the Act.
The Court’s Holding
Mrs Justice Heather Williams allowed the appeal on Ground One. Applying the analytical framework from Roads v Central Trains Ltd [2004] EWCA Civ 1541, the court held that the duty to make reasonable adjustments operates at two distinct levels. The first — whether the PCP puts disabled persons generally at a substantial disadvantage — triggers the duty (and was conceded by Lambeth). The second requires asking whether the failure to make the relevant adjustment caused a disadvantage to the individual claimant. The county court’s conflation of these levels, and its treatment of the systemic policies as fully discharging the duty regardless of their actual effect on Asiimwe, was an error of law.
The court emphasised that Schedule 2, paragraph 2(2) of the Equality Act 2010 refines the trigger for the duty by reference to “disabled persons generally,” but section 21(2) makes clear that a respondent “discriminates against a disabled person” if it fails to comply with the duty in relation to “that person.” A public authority cannot discharge the duty merely by demonstrating that reasonable systemic policies exist in the abstract; those policies must actually function to avoid the substantial disadvantage for the individual who invokes them. Where established procedures entirely failed to benefit a claimant — as they plainly did in Asiimwe’s case — that failure cannot be dismissed as merely “ad hoc” and legally irrelevant.
The court further noted that the county court’s approach gave insufficient weight to the anticipatory and ongoing nature of the reasonable adjustments duty and risked allowing public bodies to point to paper policies while tolerating persistent individual failures with impunity. The matter was remitted for further consideration consistent with the correct legal framework.
Key Takeaways
- A public authority cannot discharge its reasonable adjustments duty under section 20 of the Equality Act 2010 simply by maintaining systemic policies; where those policies fail to benefit an individual disabled claimant, a breach of duty may still be established.
- The Roads v Central Trains “double test” applies in the public functions context: the duty is triggered by disadvantage to disabled persons generally, but discrimination against the individual claimant under section 21(2) requires examining whether adjustments actually worked for that person.
- Characterising individual failures as “ad hoc” does not insulate a respondent from liability if those failures resulted in the claimant suffering the very disadvantage the duty was designed to prevent.
- Local authorities administering homelessness duties to disabled applicants with location-specific medical or care needs must ensure their policies are operative in practice, not merely on paper, for each such applicant.
Why It Matters
This decision has significant implications for local authorities and other public bodies that satisfy reasonable adjustments claims by pointing to structural policies while attributing individual breakdowns to isolated failures. The judgment clarifies that the Equality Act 2010 requires more than well-designed systems; it requires that those systems actually deliver the required adjustments to the disabled individuals they are meant to protect. For housing authorities in particular — which routinely manage thousands of homeless applicants and rely on tiered prioritisation policies — the ruling signals that systemic reasonableness is a necessary but not sufficient condition for compliance.
More broadly, the case reinforces the pro-active, anticipatory character of the reasonable adjustments duty in the public functions context. Disabled persons in vulnerable situations, such as those dependent on specific medical services or care networks, cannot be left to navigate bureaucratic failures unaided while the authority shelters behind a policy framework that demonstrably did not function for them. Practitioners advising public sector clients should review whether their reasonable adjustments regimes include adequate individual monitoring and responsive escalation mechanisms, not just general prioritisation criteria.