Facts
The claimants, Mr Nadarajah and Mr Abdi, were asylum seekers who had come to the United Kingdom via Germany. The Secretary of State certified their claims with a view to removing them to Germany as a safe third country. They relied on a Home Office policy under which, in certain circumstances, asylum claims would be considered in the United Kingdom where the applicant had family links here. The policy as operated by the Home Office contained limits which had not been published and which excluded the claimants.
Issue
Whether the claimants had a legitimate expectation that the policy, as they understood it from its published terms, would be applied to them; and more generally, on what principle and subject to what test a public authority may depart from a promise or established practice.
Held
The claimants failed. Applying the policy according to its true terms, the Secretary of State had not acted unlawfully in deciding to remove them.
Ratio
- Where a public authority has issued a promise or adopted a practice which represents how it proposes to act in a given area, the law requires it to honour that promise or practice unless there is good reason not to; what counts as good reason is to be judged by asking whether denying the expectation is a proportionate response, having regard to a legitimate aim pursued by the authority in the public interest.
- On the facts, the claimants had no expectation capable of protection that the Secretary of State would apply something other than his actual policy, and applying that policy to them was not an abuse of power.
The judgments
Laws LJ (lead)
Held that the principle underlying legitimate expectation, procedural and substantive, is a requirement of good administration, by which public bodies ought to deal straightforwardly and consistently with the public. Departure from a promise or practice is permitted only where it is a proportionate measure in the circumstances. The more the promise is specific and made to an individual or a small group, the harder it will be to justify departing from it; the more the decision lies in the macro-political field, the less intrusive the review of departure will be. On the facts there was no unfairness amounting to abuse of power.
Key reasoning
- The various strands of legitimate expectation case law, including R v North and East Devon HA, ex p Coughlan [2001] QB 213 and R v Secretary of State for Education and Employment, ex p Begbie [2000] 1 WLR 1115, can be unified by the principle of good administration rather than treated as separate categories.
- Proportionality supplies a more transparent test than abuse of power or conspicuous unfairness for deciding whether a departure from an expectation is justified, because it requires the authority to identify the public interest it is pursuing and to show that frustrating the expectation is a proportionate means of pursuing it.
- The claimants could not rely on the published version of the policy to obtain a benefit which the policy, as actually formulated and applied by the Home Office, did not give; the Secretary of State was entitled to apply his actual policy consistently.
Where it fits in the module
On substantive protection of legitimate expectations, Nadarajah is the bridge between Coughlan, which spoke of abuse of power and unfairness, and later attempts to give the doctrine a coherent foundation and a structured test. It is central to the debate whether courts should review departures from promises by proportionality, how the strength of review varies between individual promises and macro-political policy, and how legitimate expectation relates to the duty to follow published policy considered in Mandalia v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2015] UKSC 59, decided later.
Criticisms
- Grounding legitimate expectation in a broad principle of good administration may be too indeterminate to guide decision-makers or courts as to when an expectation binds.
- Applying proportionality to departures from promises arguably invites courts to weigh the merits of policy choices, raising concerns about the separation of powers and the fettering of discretion.
- The result on the facts sits uneasily with the stress on straightforward dealing, since the claimants were defeated by limits on the policy that the Home Office had not published.
Written with AI (claude-opus-5.5 (Claude Code writer)) on 1 November 2026, reviewed for errors by a second model (claude-sonnet-5.5 (Claude Code checker)). Read the case itself on Find Case Law. Spotted an error? Tell us.