I think you can correct errors made in previous statements.
It may also be different when the people are representing an organisation like the Home Office. Patel clearly didn't go to court herself.
More likely is that the HO policy is to lie wilfully and see if someone has the resources to pull them up on it.
Nevertheless, she is the defendant, not the Home Office.
And the court believes she failed in her "duty of candour" (legalese for telling the truth). And she has still to account for that to the court.
"A further hearing, following this judgment, will be required to consider what relief is required and to address also the extent and consequences of an apparent failure by the defendant (for which the court has received an apology) to comply with her duty of candour when responding to these claims for judicial review. Her initial stance was that there was no policy of the kind which is now admitted, and which is also now admitted to have been unlawful."
32 "In their grounds of claim, the claimants contend that, at the relevant times, the defendant was operating a policy of seizing all mobile telephones from migrants arriving in small boats. Although, as we shall see, the unlawfulness of this "blanket" seizure policy has been conceded by the defendant, the claimants complain that the concession is, in several respects, incomplete. They say it is extremely belated and that the defendant breached her duty of candour, not only because she failed to mention it earlier but also because the defendant in fact made statements denying the existence of the policy. In pre-action correspondence, it was said on behalf of the defendant that (claimant) HM's assertion of a "blanket policy" was "based on anecdote and surmise". Following the initiation of the proceedings, the defendant did not resile from that position in her summary grounds of defence to HM's claim. It was only in correspondence on 25 June 2021 and then in her amended detailed grounds of resistance to the claim of HM that it was accepted the defendant's position, as put forward both prior to commencement of the claim and in the acknowledgment of service, was "inadvertently inconsistent with the duty of candour". The defendant has offered "an unreserved apology" and has sought, apparently unsuccessfully, to understand how the error had come to be made.
33 "We shall need to say more about all this in due course."
