— The claimant, after a clinical trial for the use of psilocybin as a potential treatment for anorexia nervosa, wished to make a court application to allow her to be administered the otherwise-illegal psychedelic drug by a medical team. Her judicial review of the defendant's refusal of Exceptional Case Funding under s10 Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 was successful. The defendant had: (a) wrongly decided that Article 8 ECHR was not engaged because it had failed to evaluate all relevant facts; (b) failed to follow the Court of Appeal's guidance in Gudanaviciene; (c) applied the sufficient benefit test (reg 32(b) Civil Legal Aid (Merits Criteria) Regulations 2013) to completely the wrong facts. The defendant argued that their unlawful decision should not be quashed as it would have refused legal aid even if it had got the facts right, but that argument was rejected as it did not appear to the court to be "highly likely that the outcome ... would not have been substantially different": s31(2A) Senior Courts Act 1981. The court noted: "It is frankly astonishing that, in a case about the allocation of public funds, even once permission had been granted on all three grounds, the Defendant chose to continue to defend an indefensible decision at trial. In doing so, they incurred significant costs instructing counsel to put forward complex legal arguments in an effort to cure the obvious fundamental defects of the decision instead of simply reissuing a decision based on the actual circumstances of the case at hand."
Full details available at: https://www.mentalhealthlaw.co.uk/R_(EB)_v_Director_of_Legal_Aid_Casework_(2026)_EWHC_402_(Admin)?id=090326-2208