Patel v General Optical Council: Court of Appeal refuses permission despite judgement delays

The Court of Appeal has refused an optometrist permission to bring a second appeal against a Fitness to Practise Committee finding of dishonesty, notwithstanding what Lord Justice Phillips described as a series of unusual and unsatisfactory procedural irregularities in the handling of the underlying appeal.

The case, Suleman Patel v General Optical Council [2026] EWCA Civ 1206, was heard by Lord Justice Phillips and Lady Justice Falk on 2 September 2026, with judgement handed down on 22 September 2026. It arose from a determination by the General Optical Council's Fitness to Practise Committee on 5 January 2024, following a seventeen day hearing, that Mr Patel had been guilty of serious misconduct involving dishonesty and that his fitness to practise as a registered optometrist was impaired. He was suspended for nine months, though that suspension was not to take effect pending appeal.

Mr Patel appealed to the High Court under section 23G(3) of the Opticians Act 1989. The appeal was heard in the Administrative Court on 20 November 2024 by Richard Clayton KC, sitting as a Deputy High Court Judge, who dismissed it in a written judgement handed down on 17 March 2026. No order has yet been made giving effect to that decision, meaning the suspension has still not taken effect.

Mr Patel's sole ground for a second appeal was that the general handling of the case raised serious concern that it had not been dealt with to the expected standard, rendering the judgement unreliable. The Court of Appeal treated this as an allegation of procedural irregularity rather than a challenge to the correctness of the decision, and declined to allow counsel for Mr Patel to expand the argument into a substantive attack on the Deputy Judge's reasoning without proper notice.

The procedural history was unusual. The November 2024 hearing was conducted remotely while the Deputy Judge, recovering from surgery on a ruptured Achilles tendon, lay in bed and described difficulty navigating PDF bundles and taking notes. He later delivered what he termed a draft oral judgement, intending it to be corrected before formal hand down. What followed was over a year of confusion, including an apparently approved version of the judgement surfacing on Westlaw without ever being filed with the National Archives, repeated unanswered correspondence from both parties chasing a final text, and outstanding consequential matters, including costs, that remain undetermined to this day.

Lord Justice Phillips held that while Mr Patel and the General Optical Council had been deprived of their right to a prompt decision, a breach of that right did not automatically render a judgement unsafe. Applying the reasoning in Bank St Petersburg PJSC v Arkhangelsky and Cobham v Frett, he found no basis to conclude that the eventual judgement, delivered orally within sixteen days of the hearing and unchanged in substance thereafter, was unreliable as a result of the delay in its formal production. Permission to appeal was accordingly refused.

In a postscript, Lord Justice Phillips commended the Deputy Judge's willingness to sit while unwell, but stated firmly that a judge should not conduct a hearing without proper access to documents and the ability to take notes, and that reading out draft judgements orally should be discouraged as apt to cause confusion. Lady Justice Falk agreed.