My brother, Bryan McGuire QC, who has died aged 57 after a long illness, was instrumental in many of the changes and developments in public law in recent years, particularly in the fields of social housing and adult and children’s services.
He sought to improve local authority services for the vulnerable and the homeless at many levels of legal practice. In 2014-15, Bryan successfully intervened at the supreme court in London on behalf of Shelter and Crisis, in a case that was to produce a landmark ruling clarifying guidance for assessing vulnerability and eligibility for social housing.
Before the ruling, local authorities found themselves having to compare applicants in order to select who was in need of accommodation. An applicant, often with a disability, stood to be denied accommodation if deemed less vulnerable and in need of housing than a “street homeless” person. Bryan advocated that if vulnerability is a relative concept, then the correct comparator for assessing housing need should be an ordinary person who happened to be homeless, rather than an “ordinary homeless person”. The 2015 ruling meant that the vast majority of homeless people with limited physical or mental capacity could finally be considered for priority housing.
Bryan was born in Cambridge, to working-class Irish parents, Thomas, who came to England as a labourer in the 1940s and founded a civil engineering contracting business, and his wife Kathleen (nee White), who moved from Co Waterford to train as a nurse in London. One of five children, Bryan attended Cambridgeshire high school for boys (later Hills Road sixth form college), and read law at King’s College London before completing an MPhil in criminology at Darwin College, Cambridge.
He was called to the bar in 1983, and practised at Field Court Chambers before moving to Cornerstone Barristers in 2007. He was appointed Queen’s Counsel in 2010. For many years, he was editor-in-chief of Tolley’s Claims to the Possession of Land.
Bryan was a very warm-hearted and sociable person: he would often be seen on the terraces at White Hart Lane, and he frequently returned to our father’s village in Ireland to maintain strong links with our large extended family. I was honoured when he presided over my wedding last year to my wife, Julie, in Bellingham, Washington, in the US.
Our father died in 2014. Bryan is survived by our mother, by his daughters Beatrice and Margaret, from his marriage to Sarah Harding, which ended in divorce, and by my sisters, Clare, Rebecca and Rachael, and me.
