LN v Surrey NHS Primary Care Trust [2011] UKUT 76 (AAC)
"This is an interlocutory appeal against a decision of the First-tier Tribunal (Health, Education and Social Care Chamber), whereby the First-tier Tribunal declined to exclude evidence. ... the issue for the First-tier Tribunal is not whether evidence is admissible, i.e., whether it can be admitted, but is whether it should be admitted. Relevance is a key consideration. Irrelevant evidence should not be admitted. However, relevance is not the only consideration. The First-tier Tribunal is also entitled to consider the weight of evidence when deciding whether to admit it. ... It is wholly inconsistent for the primary care trust to say that it is confining its case to ten specific incidents and for it then to adduce evidence of complaints or other allegations relating to other incidents in order to show that those ten specific incidents are not isolated. ... In my judgment, the First-tier Tribunal erred in not considering whether any specific evidence should be excluded or redacted at the beginning of the hearing or whether there needed to be a clearer ruling as to the potential relevance of the evidence. It erred in law because it failed to rule that there was an inconsistency in the way the Respondent presented its case and it failed to require the Respondent to give the Appellant adequate notice of the inference it wished the First-tier Tribunal to draw from evidence of uninvestigated complaints and allegations that was not being admitted to prove the contents of the complaints and allegations." [Not an MHT case. Summary required.]