The Supreme Court's judgment on deprivation of liberty

You may be aware that the Supreme Court has recently issued a judgment which significantly changes the legal approach to determining whether a person is deprived of their liberty. The judgment can be seen here A Reference by the Attorney General for Northern Ireland of a devolution issue under paragraph 34 o….

We would encourage you to familiarise yourselves with the judgment and carefully consider the implications for your services and practice. Please see the following links for further information: CQC statement on the Supreme Court's judgment on deprivation of liberty - Care Quality Commission and 2026-UKSC-16-Summary-for-website.pdf.

We ask that you refer to this updated position when making any new referrals to the DoLS team.  In addition, as the change came into effect immediately from 2 June, please review any recent DoLS referrals you have made. You should consider whether, in light of this revised approach, any of these referrals may no longer be appropriate.

We hope this offers reassurance whilst we wait for additional National guidance to be disseminated.  At this stage we don’t have further information, but if you have a specific query, you can contact the MCA DoLS Duty Team at Dolforms@essex.gov.uk

Essex County Council - Provider Hub
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Market Context

Early Help & Prevention is about proactively supporting an adults’ wellbeing, identifying, and responding to, emerging problems so that they do not escalate, therefore preventing, reducing or delaying the need for care and support. It is person-centred, enabling adults to help themselves and overcome difficulties and build resilience.

Early Help & Prevention supports and enables the delivery of our legal duties under the Care Act to meet the needs for care and support of eligible adults and to provide support for carers.

Essex County Council invests in Early Help & Prevention to support people’s wider wellbeing and to manage demand on the ASC front door, through the commissioning of a number of services. This is in addition to support funded and provided by external partners and organisations both at a countywide and more local footprint.

Strengthening our Early Help and Prevention offer is a strategic priority for ASC, and as part of this, we work closely with Public Health colleagues and align investment where appropriate.

The offer currently includes:

  • Access to advice and information
  • Activities that promote healthy and active lifestyles
  • Schemes to reduce loneliness and social isolation
  • Support for mental, physical and emotional wellbeing

We are currently reviewing our spend on Early Help and Prevention.

Our ambition is:

  • Everyone can live their life to their fullest potential, to live as independently as possible and be supported to thrive within their own families and local communities.
  • The system works with people to identify their own solutions, building on their own strengths and assets and those of their communities.
  • We are clear what the impact of Early Help is and have the right commissioned support in place to support peoples’ needs.
  • The approach shifts focus away from managing short-term crises and towards effective support for people and their families at an earlier stage, with them at the centre of enabling environments rather than them being dependent on organised public services.

There is a plethora of Early Help services/support across Essex, provided both by ECC and externally with our partners. We want our Essex residents and professionals in the system to have easy access to good quality information and advice about the support available, both at a countywide and more local/community level.

Current market risks:

  • Accessing information, advice and Early Help support available – there is no single place to access information and advice on what support is available to people. Instead there are a range of directories and catalogues commissioned across Essex but they are not cohesive or aligned. This can leave both people and professionals confused and frustrated about what is on offer. We are working with system partners to align our commissioning and utilise Essex Frontline as the online platform to help frontline workers and the public quickly find details on local health and wellbeing services.
  • Demand for support – tthe demand for ASC support continues to rise, as does the level of complexity of cases. Early Help services are experiencing the same waiting times and waiting lists as other ASC support, however, we continue to work with our providers to ensure as timely access to support as possible.
  • Evidencing the impact of Early Help support – there are many challenges to measuring the impact of Early Help and Prevention and as such building a robust evidence base to both the individual Early Help services commissioned and the totality of their collective and wider impact is challenging. We are developing an internal commissioning framework to standardise our data and insight reporting so we can evaluate current services to evidence the impact of the current Early Help & Prevention offer.

Our current areas of focus are:

  • Building our data and insight on ASC demand and the reasons why people come to us – what support could have been offered at an earlier stage? Do our EH commissioned services meet the demand?
  • Develop an Early Help Performance Framework to demonstrate impact of initiatives/ services and requirement for continued/increased investment
  • Insight and engagement to understand how we can improve our wider information and advice landscape – including short term improvements to essex.gov to more clearly showcase our Early Help offer
Last updated: 01/04/2026
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