Welfare Benefit in UK Law

The fact that there are grounds for criticising, or disagreeing with, these views does not mean that they must be rejected. Equally, the fact that the line may have been drawn imperfectly does not mean that the policy cannot be justified.

In terms of the person who moves within a local housing authority area, the position appears to be dealt with (albeit curiously) in regulation 6(3) of the Transitional Regulations. That provides that a person makes an application for a benefit if he takes any action which results in a decision on a claim being taken under certain regulations.

However it is clear from what we have already said that in order to qualify for prosecution at all, the offence must be something other than minor, and it seems to follow that it will only be the apparently more serious cases which will come before the Crown Court. They are easy to commit and difficult and expensive to track down. However it must be remembered that they are non-violent, non-sexual and non-frightening crimes.

Although Mr Armstrong invoked section 21B of the DDA, his submissions focused on the general duty under 49A. That is understandable, because in my view, putting to one side whether the Administrative Court is an appropriate forum for a section 21 claim, there are insuperable difficulties in the claimantclaimant establishing that there has been discrimination as defined in section 21D.

We agree with Lord Reed that the court must have regard to the statutory context and that, as he puts it, in the particular statutory context, the duty of the local authority was to ensure public participation in the decision-making process. It seems to us that in order to do so it must act fairly by taking the specific steps set out by Lord Reed in his para 39. In these circumstances we can we think safely agree with both judgments.

Under the new system, a single tax credit is payable in respect of each child, irrespective of whether the claimant is in or out of work, and is administered by Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC). CTC is like income support and jobseeker's allowance, in that it is a benefit rather than a disregard and it is means-tested, so that the higher one's income the less the benefit, until eventually it tapers out altogether.

It seems clear from Stec, however, that the normally strict test for justification of sex discrimination in the enjoyment of the Convention rights gives way to the "manifestly without reasonable foundation" test in the context of state benefits. The same principles were applied to the sex discrimination involved in denying widow's pensions to men in Runkee v United Kingdom [2007] 2 FCR 178, para 36.