The London Borough of Hackney has become the latest Council to be dragged to the High Court to defend its decisions on special educational needs or SEN.

It follows Bristol City which lost an important test case in August and Surrey which is nervously expecting a judgment on its own case any day now. The Guardian’s story mentions Portsmouth as the next local authority facing a legal challenge; there may be more. In all these cases, anxious parents question whether they or the community at large have been properly consulted about the impact of proposed cuts to SEN budgets.

A few years ago, it was Libraries. Then we had reduced entitlement to adult social care. Now, it is the provision of important services in our schools. Invariably, campaigners acknowledge that local authorities are between a rock and a very hard place, and face massive difficulties in squaring the financial circle without withdrawing support for some vulnerable group or another. The days when savings could be made just by non-replacement of staff turnover are long gone.

Many of these cases revolve around the Public Sector Equality Duty and the Equality Act’s S.149 ‘due regard’ provision. In the Bristol case, the issue was that at the point where the Cabinet decided on the scale of the budget reduction, no-one had examined in depth and sought to understand the likely impact of the policy change. The Council argued that a proper consultation later on, when the detailed application of the budget could be considered was the right time for such an Impact Assessment to be made. But the Court disagreed and that is why the Bristol case carries such huge implications for Council budget consultations.

Pending the Surrey judgment, one looks at the Hackney case and sees a different approach being put under the microscope. The Council here had applied an across-the-board 5% reduction across five different categories of children with SEN requirements. Might this prove to be a manageable scale of funding cuts that might enable Hackney to defend its action at this point of the process? Or will Judges decide that service users have the right to be properly consulted the moment that significant change is being proposed.

Watch this space.