Cheshire West Overturned: DoLS in Practice

Course Outline
Course Details
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Learning Outcomes
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Course Outline:

Following the landmark ruling in A Reference by the Attorney General for Northern Ireland (The AGNI Reference) [2026] UKSC 16, frontline health and social care professionals can no longer use the “acid test” to determine if a care plan deprives a person of their liberty.

For over a decade, practitioners have operated on the basis that if a client lacks the capacity to consent to arrangements made for their care or treatment and they are subject to constant supervision and constant control and not free to leave (and so deprived of their liberty) then there must either be an application to the Court of Protection, or for a DoLS assessment.

The judgment in the AGNI’s Reference means that this has now become unlawful. It is now possible for someone to lack the legal capacity to agree to arrangements but still be able to validly consent to them. The Supreme Court has ruled that a client’s expressed or indicated contentment and an absence of active objections mean that no objective deprivation of liberty is taking place, regardless of cognitive ability or the boundaries of any locked environment.

While this judgment provides a massive opportunity to streamline community care packages, it sets a dangerous trap for general frontline staff—including local authority social workers, community nurses, OTs, and care coordinators.

Critical Care-Planning Vulnerabilities Addressed in this Course

For community-based practitioners, the AGNI Reference completely changes the mechanics of everyday assessment and case file auditing.

By replacing rigid physical metrics with fluid behavioural observation, the judgment introduces critical problems that general frontline staff must learn to navigate:

DoLS Overuse Risk

Frontline staff have spent over a decade trained to believe that if a client lacks cognitive capacity to agree to a care plan, and the placement features significant enough restrictions on liberty, a DoLS referral must be made.

Because AGNI rules that an individual can lack mental capacity but still display de facto contentment, practitioners who keep persuading care home managers to file defensive applications for a standard authorisation under DoLS, whilst also granting themselves an urgent authorisation are actively filling local authority systems with applications which can never be granted.

Unlawful Restrictive Care

Because a client's passive, uncommunicative compliance means no objective deprivation of liberty is taking place, there is an immense institutional temptation for care planners to assemble restrictive care packages (such as 1:1 supervision or strict routine control) without seeking statutory oversight.

This would be unlawful, as it ignores the Serious Doubt Rule, which prohibits treating compliance caused by heavy clinical sedation or institutional fear as valid consent.

Behavioural Fluctuation Challenges

The real-world headache during a community review is the frequent fluctuation in a client's behaviour (such as when “sundowning” is present).

Practitioners must now be trained to identify the threshold where a client's fluid behavioural distress legally invalidates a community care package put together with their consent.

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Key Learning Outcomes:

By the end of this 1-day course, general health and social care practitioners will be able to:

Apply the AGNI’s Reference multifactorial assessment to general health and social care settings, confidently identifying when everyday care boundaries mirror a "prison cell paradigm."
Decouple DoLS mental capacity assessments from the evaluation of valid, behavioural, consent, breaking the habit of assuming a lack of capacity equals an automatic DoLS or Court of Protection referral.
Recognise and document the full spectrum of client resistance, accurately distinguishing between state-enforced containment and non-coercive restrictions of movement.
Implement legally defensive care-planning protocols for community clients whose behavioural expression and distress levels fluctuate daily.
Draft Care Act, or Social Services and Wellbeing (Wales) Act assessments and community care plans that explicitly capture robust, audit-proof evidence of behavioural contentment and proxy assent to withstand regulatory and judicial review.