Asiimwe v Lambeth: a good system is not enough if you cannot show it actually worked

A disabled man spent nearly twenty months in temporary accommodation in North Finchley after Lambeth had accepted he needed to be housed within the borough or within thirty minutes of the hospital where he received treatment. That fact alone tells most of the story. But the High Court's judgement in Asiimwe v London Borough of Lambeth does more than expose the human cost of housing system failures; it clarifies an important and genuinely contested point about the reasonable adjustments duty under the Equality Act 2010.

Patrick Asiimwe suffered a serious acquired brain injury following a stroke in 2018, leaving him with memory impairment, sight loss and mobility difficulties. After making a homelessness application in October 2021, he was not placed in any temporary accommodation for three months. When he was finally housed, it was in North Finchley, a placement his own council had already identified as unsuitable. He requested a suitability reassessment in November 2022 and waited over seven months for a response, which only arrived after he issued judicial review proceedings.

The county court dismissed his claim that Lambeth had breached the reasonable adjustments duty. The judge found that Lambeth had put in place reasonable systemic measures, including a Housing Placements Policy that prioritised disabled people with care needs for in-borough accommodation and a transfer list for urgent cases. What had gone wrong in Mr Asiimwe's case was, in her view, an "ad hoc" or "individual" failure rather than evidence of any broader structural problem. The reasonable adjustments duty, she reasoned, was a systemic one: she was not looking at what went wrong for this particular claimant personally, but at the structural position.

Mrs Justice Heather Williams allowed the appeal on one of the two grounds argued. The first ground, that an individual failure to apply an otherwise adequate adjustment itself amounts to unlawful discrimination, was rejected. The court undertook a careful analysis of sections 20 and 21 of the Equality Act 2010 and concluded that in cases governed by Schedule 2 (services and public functions), the duty to make reasonable adjustments is measured at a systemic level. If a public authority has genuinely taken reasonable steps to adjust a provision, criterion or practice at a class-wide level, an ad hoc failure to apply those steps in a particular case does not, of itself, constitute a breach of the duty. The right of action in section 21(2) links discrimination against an individual to a failure to comply with the systemic duty, not to every individual operational lapse.

That said, the second ground succeeded and it is where the real practical significance of the case lies. The judge below had treated the failings in Mr Asiimwe's case as simply irrelevant to the systemic question. That was an error. Individual failings are plainly capable of being evidence that the systemic adjustments are not working as intended, or not working at all. When a claimant demonstrates that the system failed them, a defendant bearing the burden of proof under section 136 of the Act cannot simply assert that this was a one-off. It must explain why things went wrong and what that implies, or does not imply, about the practical effectiveness of its procedures.

In this case Lambeth's witness could not explain why the suitability reassessment had not happened. No evidence was placed before the court about how the transfer list operated in practice, what the usual timeframes were, or how often similar delays occurred for others in the same class of disabled persons. The judge below had impermissibly cordoned off the individual failings from the systemic inquiry. That misdirection infected her conclusion.

The case is now remitted to the same judge, limited to the reasonable steps question, and on the evidence already heard. The defendant will not have a second opportunity to fill the evidentiary gaps. That is a significant practical consequence and a pointed reminder that bare assertions of good systems, unsupported by evidence of how those systems function in practice, will not discharge a burden of proof in discrimination proceedings.

Asiimwe v The London Borough of Lambeth [2026] EWHC 1479 (KB), Mrs Justice Heather Williams DBE, 17 June 2026.