Sengupta v The GMC [2025] EWHC 123 (Admin) – how many bites of the cherry should an applicant be afforded after they have been erased from the register?

In what must surely be one of the longest running cases in medical professional discipline (and the hardest to summarise pithily), the High Court has recently given some guidance in cases where an erased doctor applies multiple times to be restored to the register.

Dr Rinku Sengupta was erased from the register at the conclusion of fitness to practise proceedings in March 2010. The panel’s decision was essentially based on two grounds. First, there had been findings of dishonesty made against Dr Sengupta, as she had given incomplete and misleading information to a prospective employer about her training, and had taken credit for the work of another doctor on a report submitted to an academic journal. Second, the doctor’s clinical skills were found to be unacceptable in several respects.

Under section 41 of the Medical Act 1983, a practitioner whose name has been erased by a fitness to practise panel may, no sooner than five years after the erasure, apply to the Medical Practitioners’ Tribunal to be restored to the register. Dr Sengupta availed herself of this provision promptly in 2015, but her application was refused.

Section 41(2)(b) of the 1983 Act allows a practitioner to make further applications for restoration, but not before 12 months have elapsed since the last application. Perhaps taking more time to remediate the MPT’s concerns as to her fitness to practise, Dr Sengupta made her second application for restoration three years after her first unsuccessful application. That second application, also, was refused.

The Tribunal on that second occasion was required to consider not only Dr Sengupta’s restoration application, but also whether to exercise its power to indefinitely suspend her from making any further such applications in the future. That power is granted to panels under section 41(9) of the 1983 Act (although section 41(11) enables a practitioner whose ability to apply for restoration has been indefinitely suspended to apply for that suspension to be reviewed after three years of that decision). On that occasion, the Tribunal decided not to indefinitely suspend Dr Sengupta’s ability to reapply for restoration, noting that she had presented additional evidence beyond that which had been considered in 2015, and that the further application was not frivolous or an abuse of the system.

Dr Sengupta applied for restoration again in 2021 (for the third time), but in January 2022 the Medical Practitioners’ Tribunal refused that application and, this time, indefinitely suspended her right to reapply.

Not to be deterred, Dr Sengupta appealed that decision to the High Court. Whilst the decision not to restore her to the register was left untrammelled by Linden J, his Lordship did overturn the decision on indefinite suspension. First, the Tribunal had relied on emails Dr Sengupta had sent to a colleague in 2017 as demonstrating dishonesty, when, in fact, those emails had already been considered by the Tribunal that heard Dr Sengupta’s (second) application in 2018, and had been found to be intemperate rather than dishonest. Second, that the Tribunal had failed to afford Dr Sengupta the opportunity to make further representations as to indefinite suspension, which was enshrined in Rule 24(2)(i)(i) of the Fitness to Practise Rules 2014. His Lordship remitted the case back to the Medical Practitioners’ Tribunal to decide on the issue of indefinite suspension again. But in December 2023, the panel again decided to indefinitely suspend Dr Sengupta’s ability to apply for restoration.

The irrepressible Dr Sengupta again challenged that decision in the High Court. The judgment of Swift J is perhaps most notable for its attempt to offer some guidance for Tribunals who find themselves considering indefinitely suspending a doctor’s ability to apply for restoration. Perhaps because the MPTS has so rarely encountered practitioners with the persistence of Dr Sengupta, it has never produced any formal guidance of its own on this topic. Whilst section 41(12) of the 1983 Act stipulates that such a decision shall be reached ‘hav[ing] regard to the over-arching objective’, His Lordship considered that an unparticularised resort to the over-arching objective was unlikely to be helpful. His Lordship suggested the following as a non-exhaustive list of considerations that may be relevant in certain cases:

1. Whether any sufficient reason exists to prevent the practitioner making further restoration applications.
2. The past conduct of the practitioner when making restoration applications.
3. Have such applications as have been made been without merit (i.e. ones that had little or no reasonable prospect of success)?
4. Has the practitioner conducted herself unreasonably when pursuing restoration applications?
5. Whether, taking account of all the circumstances, such as the reasons for erasure, events since that decision, and the general passage of time, there is any reasonable prospect that future applications for restoration will succeed.

Ultimately, in yet a further reprieve, the Court held that the panel in December 2023 had erred, in that it had based its decision on inconsistencies between Dr Sengupta’s written submissions and her oral submissions, which it considered called her insight into question, but had not identified what these inconsistencies were.

While it remains to be seen how this saga will end, those of us representing individuals who refuse to be written out of their chosen profession would do well to note the guidance offered in this judgment.