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Neutral Citation Number:	2009 UKUT 200 AAC
Reported Number:
File Number:	CPC 1343 2007
Appellant:	Secretary of State for Work and Pensions
Respondent:	Scott
Judge/Commissioner:	Three-Judge Panel / Tribunal of Commissioners
Date Of Decision:	08/10/2009
Date Added:	28/10/2009
Main Category:	Income support and state pension credit
Main Subcategory:	other: state pension credit
Secondary Category:
Secondary Subcategory:
Notes:	Reported as [2011] AACR 23. State pension credit – minimum guarantee – meaning of “members of a religious order fully maintained by their order" The appellants before the Upper Tribunal were both nuns, living in different autonomous religious communities. IS was maintained from a charitable trust, of which she was a trustee. The trust ran a nursing home and playgroup, which she managed. KM was in receipt of retirement pension, which she paid to the community. They both made claims for state pension credit. The claims were refused on the ground that regulation 6(2)(b) and (3) of the State Pension Credit Regulations 2002 applied, which provides that in the case of members of religious orders who are fully maintained by their order the minimum guarantee is nil and therefore there cannot be entitlement to state pension credit. Both claimants argued that they were not maintained by a religious order but by a self-maintaining religious community. In both cases the appeal tribunal allowed the appeal and the Secretary of State appealed. Before the Upper Tribunal the claimants argued that the expression “religious order” connoted the existence of centralised authority and control. The Upper Tribunal rejected that contention, holding that, to the extent that the appeal tribunals accepted the claimants’ contentions on the meaning of “religious order”, they made an error in point of law. The Upper Tribunal also held that the fact that the claimants by their own work or entitlement to benefits contributed to the funds that supported their orders did not prevent their being fully maintained by their orders and decided that the claimants were not victims for the purposes of the Human Rights Act 1998 as, even if the legislation were discriminatory and the word “religious” were deleted, it would still apply to the claimants. IS appealed to the Court of Appeal. The discrimination argument was not pursued before the Court of Appeal. It was argued that a member of a religious order will be “fully maintained” by that order only if it is able to maintain her independently and irrespective of her own contributions to the generation of the income that enables the maintenance to be provided. Held, dismissing the appeal, that: 1. the claimant's maintenance was correctly to be regarded as provided by the trust rather than, as the appeal tribunal appeared to accept, directly by her own efforts and for her own benefit, and that appeared to confirm the correctness of the Upper Tribunal’s decision that she was at the time of her claim being maintained by a religious order of which she was a member (paragraph 18); 2. the proposition that “full maintenance” is only conceptually possible if the recipient is making no contribution finds no support in the language of the regulations, nor was there any reason in principle why such a qualification should be read into such language (paragraph 20); 3. the claimant was being “fully maintained” by the order at the time she made her claim and that meant that her claim was doomed to fail, as it did. If she became incapable of continuing to contribute her services and the order were therefore unable to continue fully to maintain her, then the position would be different and a claim might be capable of being made (paragraph 21).
Decision(s) to Download:	[2011] AACR 23ws.doc