A Local Authority v H (by her litigation friend the Official Solicitor) [2012] EWHC 49 (COP) (Hedley J): H was a 29-year old woman who had been admitted to psychiatric hospital since August 2009 and, at the date of the hearing, lived in supervised accommodation which she was not permitted to leave unless supervised. She had mild learning difficulty and atypical autism with a low IQ and lacked capacity to litigate, to determine her residence, her care and support arrangements, contact with her family and her finances. She was highly sexualised and vulnerable. Before she was admitted to hospital, at least one man had been convicted of an attempted rape against her. She had given her psychiatrist an account of sexual activity that amounted to rape in one respect and could be seen as exploitative of her. The Judge considered s.3(1) MCA when deciding whether she had the capacity to consent to sexual relations. He found that, for a person to understand the relevant information, a fairly rudimentary knowledge was all that was required; it was sufficient to understand that sexual relations may lead to significant ill-health and that those risks can be reduced by precautions like a condom. It was no part of the test that a person might understand the moral aspects of human sexual relationships. It was also necessary for a person to understand that he or she has a choice and can refuse sexual relationships. The test as to whether a person is capable of using and weighing the information meant, in this context, whether he or she was able to deploy the general knowledge of sexual relations into a specific decision-making act. Having applied those tests, the Judge found that H did understand that she had a choice, albeit that she had difficulty in saying no to sexual relations, but did not appreciate the health issues arising and could not deploy the information that she had effectively into the decision-making process. Accordingly she lacked capacity to consent to sexual relations. Although H showed no immediate disposition to marry, it followed that a person who lacked capacity to consent to sexual relations must also lack capacity (although he declined to make a formal declaration to that effect). There was to be a review of her best capacity and best interests in September 2012. Click here for the judgment.