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By October 2025, the local authority had concluded that 24-hour live-in care was no longer necessary and sought court approval to replace it with four daily care visits supported by assistive technology. The court agreed, bringing an end to all restrictions on contact between Caroline and her mother.
Following AGNI, has P (who has capacity to make decisions about care and residence) been deprived of her liberty for the purposes of making a human rights claim?
The family members are adamant that the new care providers are “the worst agency they’ve been involved with” and report receiving somewhere between 50 and 100 distress calls each day from P in which she begs them to prevent her having to go home with those carers. Their view is that if P returns home with this care provider, then her quality of life at home would be no better than her remaining in…
At first sight, this appeared to be a straightforward example of the post-AGNI legal framework in practice. The applicant local authority invited the court to discharge the COPDOL order. But there was a complication. The P in this case is a “restricted patient”, living in the community under “conditional discharge”.
We have asked ourselves umpteen times over the years what DoLS have ever done for Joe’s mother. Hopefully now, post-AGNI, we can be left to care and advocate for Joe’s mother as we have always sought to do, and the DoLS focus can rightfully shift to those vulnerable individuals who really are deprived of their liberty and don’t have anyone to advocate on their behalf.
I hope that the practical plan put in place by DJ Clarke will enable the family and professionals to collaborate effectively and ensure that the Official Solicitor can obtain P’s wishes and feelings. Ultimately, the decisions being made are about P’s life, and his voice must be at the centre of those decisions.
Despite the obvious importance of establishing the legal basis of P’s confinement (is it or isn’t it a ‘deprivation of liberty’?), this judge – like others I’ve watched since AGNI - gave priority to considering whether P’s residence and care arrangements were in his best interests and the least restrictive necessary.
In April 2025, a woman with diagnoses of mild learning disability, emotionally unstable personality disorder, functional neurological disorder, dissociative disorder and elective mutism, was admitted to hospital. In September 2025, she had surgery and was soon afterwards declared medically fit to leave. But the discharge did not happen. Instead, the case became mired in the unresolved…
Polly has lived her life in the context of both the ‘ordinary usage’ of ‘liberty’ with its powerful social and political symbolism, and also the more peculiar legal definitions created by judicial interpretation of mental capacity legislation.
One positive consequence of the AGNI judgment may be that it encourages professionals to refocus on their own responsibilities under the Mental Capacity Act. By reducing the number of cases that require formal deprivation of liberty authorisation, there is an opportunity for practitioners to develop greater confidence in undertaking capacity assessments, making best interests decisions and…
