Tom Royston appears in breakthrough Upper Tribunal appeal of universal credit award and housing cost provisions

9 October 2026

The case was heard by a three-judge panel in the Administrative Appeals Chamber of the Upper Tribunal (pictured). Credit: Gordon Bell / Shutterstock.

The Upper Tribunal has allowed an appeal about universal credit entitlement with significant implications for social security claimants’ access to justice, and tribunal procedure.

Garden Court North’s Tom Royston was instructed by Will Ford of Osbornes Law Solicitors to represent the successful appellant in Dawod v Secretary of State for Work and Pensions [2026] UKUT 360 (AAC) (29 September 2026).

Mr Dawod’s original universal credit award in 2022 omitted any provision for his housing costs. When he tried to have that corrected, the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) refused to do so retrospectively, which left him several months in rent arrears.

When Mr Dawod appealed, the DWP said the original decision could not be changed, because there had been no ‘mandatory reconsideration’ of that decision. In other words, there had been no process of considering whether to revise the original decision.

Instead, the DWP said it had considered only whether to ‘supersede’ the decision. Mr Dawod’s attempt to appeal to the First-tier Tribunal was repeatedly dismissed, as noted in the Upper Tribunal’s judgment:

[11] The FTT had three goes at getting this appeal right. As will become painfully apparent, it got it wrong three times.

Upper Tribunal sits as three-judge panel

With the assistance of Child Poverty Action Group, Tom and Osbornes Solicitors represented Mr Dawod in his appeal to the Upper Tribunal, which exceptionally sat as a three-judge panel due to the difficulty and importance of the point of law at issue.

The DWP continued to maintain that a tribunal could not change the original decision, because the DWP had not itself yet considered whether to do so. In stating this, the DWP took the position that it had been failing to discharge a legally obligatory function for more than three-and-a-half years.

The Upper Tribunal allowed Mr Dawod’s appeal and awarded him the housing costs he and his wife Ms Alla should have been paid in 2022. It finds that what the DWP describes as consideration only whether to ‘supersede’ the decision did amount to mandatory reconsideration. The Upper Tribunal emphasises that the mandatory reconsideration process requires only consideration whether to revise, and does not require an actual decision either to revise or not to revise [§66].

Dawod is a very significant decision because there appear to be ‘many’ [§3] cases where the DWP says an appeal cannot be pursued because it has not conducted a mandatory reconsideration. The Upper Tribunal finds that whether there has been mandatory reconsideration is a question of fact for the tribunal, and what matters is the substance of what has occurred [§69]. The DWP’s characterisation of the decision-making process is unlikely to be important [§76], and critically, the absence of a revision decision does not prevent there having been ‘consideration’ of whether to revise [§67].

Further, given the statutory obligation to consider revision before supersession, where an application for revision results in a decision to supersede there has to be consideration of revision [§70]. Finally, it does not matter whether or not there were grounds for extending time to enable a late revision [§85].

In future, it should be much simpler to have appeals of this kind admitted and allowed. The cases most likely to be affected will be those where an error in an award (such as not including housing costs) is only picked up later and the DWP refuses to correct it retrospectively.

Tom Royston is part of Garden Court North’s social security team. He was instructed by Will Ford at Osbornes Law Solicitors to represent Mr Dawod.

Additional media

Upper Tribunal – Dawod v Secretary of State for Work and Pensions [2026] UKUT 360 (AAC) (29 September 2026)

Z2K – Over The Hurdle: The Case for Replacing Mandatory Reconsideration

For further information, please contact Alex Blair, Communications Manager at Garden Court North Chambers: ablair@gcnchambers.co.uk