In August 2018, the Supreme Court handed down its judgment that denying bereavement benefits to unmarried, cohabiting partners with children is incompatible with human rights law. Separately, CPAG is representing a Muslim woman with two young children who was also denied WPA following the sudden death of her partner with whom she had been through an Islamic marriage ceremony and believed herself to be lawfully married.
This case concerns the removal of the spare room subsidy, widely referred to as the ‘bedroom tax’, in cases where a bedroom is too small for two children to share.
This appeal concerns the application of the ‘past presence’ test that requires disability benefit claimants to be resident in Great Britain for 104 weeks out of the 156 weeks prior to the claim. However, for claimants to whom an EU regulation applies, the past presence test is disapplied if they can establish a genuine and sufficient link to the UK social security system.
The issue raised by this case in the Court of Appeal is whether the UK’s Immigration (EEA) Regulations 2006 must be read pursuant to EU law as providing a right to reside in the UK not only to EEA children in education whose parents have been employed persons, but also to those whose parents have been self-employed persons. Regretfully the Court of Appeal has decided that there is no such requirement and an application for permission to appeal to the Supreme Court has been refused.
