Tribunal decisions

The decision

IN THE UPPER TRIBUNAL
IMMIGRATION AND ASYLUM CHAMBER Case No: UI-2026-002477
First-tier Tribunal No:
[HU/57872/2024]

THE IMMIGRATION ACTS

Decision & Reasons Issued:

14th October 2026

Before

UPPER TRIBUNAL JUDGE RUDDICK

Between

RASHPAL SINGH
Appellant
and

SECRETARY OF STATE FOR THE HOME DEPARTMENT
Respondent

Representation:
For the Appellant: Mr Z. Reza, instructed by Charles Simmons Immigration Solicitors
For the Respondent: Ms A. Ahmed, Senior Home Office Presenting Officer

Heard at Field House on 5 October 2026

DECISION AND REASONS
Introduction
1. The appellant is a citizen of India born in 1956. He arrived in the UK on 23 October 2022 on a visit visa valid through 21 March 2023. The visa had been granted to enable him to visit his son, who is settled in the UK, his British daughter-in-law and his British grandchild, who was born in September 2019. Shortly after his arrival, he was hospitalised with severe chest pain and diagnosed with deep vein thrombosis and a pulmonary embolism. On 1 March 2023, he applied for permission to stay both under the private life provisions of the Immigration Rules and outside the rules on human rights grounds. On 25 June 2024, the respondent refused that application. The appellant appealed to the First-tier Tribunal (“FTT”), and in a decision dated 7 February 2026, the FTT dismissed his appeal. The appellant now appeals with permission against that decision.
The grounds of appeal
2. The appellant raises six grounds of appeal. In summary, they are:
(i) The FTT made material errors of fact about the two medical reports and the two death certificates he relied on;
(ii) The FTT made inconsistent findings about whether the appellant’s wife and daughter had died;
(iii) In assessing the weight to be given to a report on the appellant’s mental health, the FTT overlooked the material fact that the respondent had accepted that the appellant suffered from depression and anxiety;
(iv) At [22] of the decision, the FTT found that the appellant and his son “exaggerate the issues that the Appellant has and were not honest about the support he has in India”, but it failed to give any reasons for this finding;
(v) The FTT made a finding that the appellant had not intended to return to India at the end of his visit, but in doing so it overlooked two material facts: the appellant’s return flight ticket and the medical emergency he experienced shortly after arrival; and
(vi) In conducting its article 8 assessment, the FTT failed to make findings about the emotional dependency between the appellant and his UK-based family.
The hearing
3. At the hearing before me, I had a 548-page bundle compiled by the appellant. This included the respondent’s Rule 24 response.
4. I heard submissions from both parties. Mr Reza focused his submissions on Ground One, and Ms Ahmed subsequently agreed that the medical evidence was at the heart of the appellant’s appeal to the FTT, such that if Ground One were made out, the decision would need to be set aside. Ms Ahmed did not concede any of the grounds, however, and made able and helpful submissions about all of them. I have taken the parties’ submissions into account in making my decision, although I do not consider it necessary to rehearse them in detail here.
Discussion
Ground One
5. The appellant’s case was, in summary, that he qualified for permission to stay under the Immigration Rules because there would be very significant obstacles to his reintegration in India or, alternatively, that his removal would be a disproportionate interference with his private life and with the family life he shared with his UK-based family members, with whom he had been living since his arrival in the UK. He also said that he met the requirements of the Rules for a grant of leave to enter as an adult dependent relative because he required long term personal care to perform everyday tasks and adequate care would not be available in India. Although he accepted that he could not meet the requirements of the rules for a grant of permission to stay on that basis (as the Rules require such applications to be made from outside the UK), he argued that the fact that he met the rest of the requirements of the adult dependent relative rules weighed in his favour in the article 8 assessment.
6. The evidence offered by the appellant purported to show that he suffered from both physical and mental ill health and was emotionally and physically dependent on his UK-based family. He said he had no one to look after him in India because his wife had died in 2022 and his only other child had died in 2018. Several of his siblings had also died, and he could not count on his extended family for support. His son expressed the opinion that adequate paid care would not be available in India.
7. In addition to various NHS records, the appellant relied on two medial reports. One was by Dr Richard R.H. Coombes, a Consultant Orthopaedic Surgeon. Although Dr Coombes summarised the appellant’s various medical conditions based on the records before him, the focus of the report was the condition of the appellant’s left knee, on which he had already had multiple surgeries. Dr Coombes expressed the opinion that the appellant had “very great difficulty in mobilising” and required “considerable care and assistance” from his son and daughter-in-law. He also expressed the opinion that it would be “inappropriate” for the appellant to travel by air “at the present time”, given his history of deep venous thrombosis and pulmonary embolus.
8. The other medical report was by Dr Gupta, a Consultant General Adult Psychiatrist. Dr Gupta diagnosed the appellant with a moderate depressive episode with somatic symptoms and dysthymia and expressed the opinion that he required medication, counselling and family support.
9. At [26], the FTT said about Dr Coombes’ report:
“The report from Dr Coombes I find I can give little weight to as he did not meet the Appellant and has not made any medical assessment of him, he has simply seen some of the Appellant’s the [sic] paperwork. He comments on the Appellant’s ability to fly but I find that the Home Office will make a full assessment of the Appellant to see if they are fit to fly, The fact that he has had a thrombosis does not mean that he will automatically have another one”.
10. It then set out its reasons for rejecting Dr Gupta’s report at [27]-[29]. They were that:
(i) Because Dr Gupta had not met the appellant in person and had not seen his medical records, “this means that the doctor had relied on the Appellant’s written account”: [27];
(ii) He had not “maintained an objective viewpoint”. He had seen the appellant by video conference and had not considered whether he “may not have been credible or has exaggerate[d] his account”. Instead, he had “taken at face value all he has said.”: [28]
(iii) “It is certainly not for an export [sic] to criticise a previous Tribunal’s decision. When the materials to which they should have regard include previous determinations by a judge, they should not conduct a running commentary on the reasoning of the judge who has made such findings but should concentrate on describing and evaluating the medical evidence (IY (Turkey) [2012] EWCA Civ 1560 [37].”: [29]
11. I find that the FTT did err in its assessment of these reports. With regard to Dr Coombes’ report, it is clearly wrong that he had “simply seen some of the Appellant’s […] paperwork”. The report records that it was based on a 60-minute video consultation, as well as medical records and photographs. It contains a section entitled “On Examination”, which contains three short paragraphs of written observations and eight photographs. In the Rule 24 response, the respondent suggested that the FTT’s complaint was not that the expert had not examined the appellant, but that he had not done so in person. I find that this relies on ignoring the clear meaning of the words the FTT used. The finding that the doctor had “simply seen some of the Appellant’s […] paperwork” is clearly and unambiguously worded and there is no justification for reading it as meaning anything other than what it says.
12. Moreover, what examinations are necessary in order to diagnose certain conditions is clearly a matter within a medical professional’s competence, and if the FTT was of the view that Dr Coombes was wrong to express an opinion about the appellant’s mobility issues based on reading his medical records, speaking to him and observing his movements via videolink, it was incumbent on it to explain the basis for that view. Finally, I consider that such a belief would have been inconsistent with the FTT’s reliance, at [43](i), on its own visual observations of the appellant’s ability to walk in and out of the courtroom in its assessment of the appellant’s current state of health, an observation that was also made via videolink. For these reasons, I reject the respondent’s reading of the FTT as having meant to express its concern that the diagnosis was made via video consultation.
13. The picture with regard to Dr Gupta’s report is more complicated. The FTT was slightly inconsistent in finding at [27] that Dr Gupta had “relied on the Appellant’s written account” but acknowledging at [28] that Dr Gupta had seen him via a video conference. However, when the reasoning is read as a whole, I consider that the meaning is clear. The FTT expressed two distinct criticisms. The first was that Dr Gupta had relied on the appellant’s written account of his medical history rather than any medical records ([27]) and the second was that when diagnosing the appellant’s mental health conditions, Dr Gupta relied on what was said during the video consultation without considering whether the appellant may have been exaggerating and without the benefit of seeing any relevant medical records: [28] Both of these criticisms were reasonably open to the FTT.
14. As to the comments at [29] that begin “It is certainly not for an export [sic] to criticise a previous Tribunal’s decision”, it is conceded that there was no previous tribunal decision in this case and that therefore it was a clear error for the FTT to have raised this as a reason for rejecting Dr Gupta’s report. It appears that the entirety of the sentence beginning “When the materials to which they should have regard” and concluding with the citation to IY (Turkey) was taken word-for-word from [7] of the refusal decision, as was the observation that “The more a diagnosis is dependent on assuming that the account given by the appellant was to be believed, the less likely it is that significant weight will be attached to it (HH (Ethiopia) [2007] EWCA Civ 306 [23])”. Because these sentences were taken directly from the refusal decision but other statements of the relevant law in the refusal decision were not, I conclude that the FTT intended to incorporate this specific criticism into its decision. This means that this was not a case in which the FTT accidentally included a paragraph from another of its own decisions, which would be more in the nature of a typographical error than an error in reasoning.
15. Given that the FTT’s other reasons for criticising Dr Gupta’s report were based on an accurate description of the report’s contents and reasonably open to it, Ms Ahmed asked me to treat this error as immaterial. I decline to do so. It was one of only three specific criticisms that the FTT raised of the report and comes immediately before the single-sentence paragraph [30], which gives the FTT’s conclusion: “I do not find that I can place any real weight on the report by Dr Gupta in this appeal”. It thus appears to have played a significant role in the FTT’s reasoning. Moreover, in spite of the shortcomings of Dr Gupta’s report, I cannot say that any rational judge who did not make such an error would have effectively given it no weight at all, as this judge did.
16. These errors were obviously material. At [43](i), the FTT made a series of findings about the appellant’s state of health. They were based on the appellant’s GP records, the FTT’s own observations of how the appellant had entered the courtroom for the video hearing and what appears to be either his or his son’s witness statements or their oral evidence. The expert reports played no role in the assessment because, as the FTT reiterated, “I have already given detailed findings as to why the Tribunal has given very little weight to the experts’ reports in this appeal.”
17. Also under Ground One, the appellant submits that the FTT erred at [31] when it referred to the death certificates for his wife and daughter as “claimed death certificates” and described them as “not translated”. The appellant maintains that the death certificates were, in fact, translated. This is only partly accurate. Both certificates contain English versions of all of the official categories of information, such as name, date of death and place of death. Only in the wife’s death certificate, however, is all of the information about the decedent recorded in English. In what purports to be the daughter’s certificate, the date of death and date of registration use Arabic numerals, but the name of the decedent is not in Roman script. The fact remains, however, that the FTT clearly erred in treating the wife’s death certificate as untranslated. Here, too, the respondent has invited me in the Rule 24 response to rewrite the decision and to find that “the FTTJ was implicitly commenting that the originals were not before her and that the copies before her were difficult to read”. I prefer to based my decision on what the FTT actually wrote, given that it is clear and unambiguous.
18. The materiality of this error has to be assessed in the context of the FTT’s other relevant findings. Later in [31], the FTT found that the appellant had been “caring for his wife and daughter”, which suggests that they were alive relatively recently and that the appellant’s claim that his daughter died in childbirth in 2018 has been rejected. At [52], however, the FTT found that the appellant “had no intentions of returning to India once his wife and daughter passed away.” Given the ambiguity of the finding that the appellant had been “caring for his wife and daughter”, I cannot find that the error as to the wife’s death certificate was immaterial because her death was in any event accepted at [52]. Whether the appellant’s wife and daughter had died was clearly a material issue, as it was highly relevant to the care that would be available to the appellant on return, his ability to reintegrate in India and his intentions in coming to the UK.
19. Ground One is made out, and for the reasons given above, the error was material.
20. Ground Two is also made out.
21. The appellant’s current state of mental and physical health and the presence (or absence) of his wife and daughter in India were central to the appellant’s claim, both under and outside the rules. Because Grounds One and Two are made out, I consider that the appeal must be set aside on these grounds alone and that it is not necessary to consider the other grounds of appeal.
22. Ms Ahmed asked me to preserve the finding that the standard for an article 3 health claim was not met, but I decline to do so. The errors as to the medical reports must have infected any findings of fact regarding the appellant’s current state of health. I therefore set the decision aside in its entirety.
23. Taking into account the guidance set out in Majera v SSHD [2025] EWCA Civ 159, Begum (Remaking or remittal) Bangladesh [2023] UKUT 00046 (IAC) and AEB v SSHD [2022] EWCA Civ 1512, as well as the Practice Statement of 11 June 2018, and I consider that remittal to the FTT is appropriate given the extensive fact-finding required.

Notice of Decision
The First-tier Tribunal’s decision of 7 February 2026 is set aside in its entirety and the appeal is remitted to the First-tier Tribunal for a fresh hearing before any other judge.

E. Ruddick

Judge of the Upper Tribunal
Immigration and Asylum Chamber

14 October 2026