I will address all the Government and Opposition new clauses and amendments, but I will spend more time on the provisions dealing with judicial review than the new clauses on planning, partly because the latter are relatively uncontroversial.
Yesterday, the Prime Minister held a party for the 799th birthday of Magna Carta. He said that it was the foundation of all “our laws and liberties”, and made us citizens not subjects, with “rights, protections and security”. He is right about that. Later this afternoon, we will debate new clauses on sentencing for a second offence of possessing a knife. The Deputy Prime Minister objects to that proposal, partly because it includes minimum sentencing, which carries
“a serious risk it could undermine the role of the judges”.
He is wrong about that in relation to the new clauses, and he and his party have supported minimum sentencing when it has suited them to do so. Right or wrong, however, one has to applaud the sentiment that the rule of law and the importance of a strong and independent judiciary are the most important protections against the arbitrary or incorrect use of Executive power, especially in a country with no written constitution.
Sadly, such sentiments and lip service are all we can expect from a coalition Government who, in no less a person than the Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice, have done more to undermine the rule of law and the operation of the legal system than any Government in modern times. They have presided over the dismantling of civil legal aid and now of criminal legal aid, the privatisation of the probation service, chaos in those courtrooms that are still open, an overcrowding crisis in our prisons, the expansion of secret courts, attacks on human rights, and restrictions on access to justice for victims and those of limited means. Yesterday, to mark Magna Carta day, protests took place outside courts across the country.
In part 4 of the Bill comes the coup de grace—a frontal assault on the key legal remedy of judicial review. Alongside new fees, cuts in legal aid and shorter time limits, the cumulative effect of the proposals in the Bill is to hobble the principal method by which the administrative court can prevent unlawful conduct by the state in the way in which it, in all its manifestations, makes decisions.
One of the 17 experts who gave evidence to the Public Bill Committee memorably described the Government’s proposals for judicial review as a “constitutional provocation”; 16 of the 17 opposed them outright. The seventeenth, the head of planning for Taylor Wimpey UK, did support them, but slightly undermined his case by confessing:
“I have only had sight of the Bill…and I am attending at late notice”.––[Official Report, Criminal Justice and Courts Public Bill Committee, 13 March 2014; c. 151, Q341.]
It is not surprising that the Secretary of State could find no one qualified to support his position, which, as usual, is based on his gut instinct that judicial review is used to defeat Government policy for political reasons and that, as he confided to the Daily Mail, it is
“a promotional tool for countless Left-wing campaigners.”
The truth is that it is inconvenient for the Government when, for example, the High Court and the Appeal Court rule that they acted unlawfully in trying to close Lewisham hospital A and E. No doubt some doughty left-wing campaigners supported that judicial review—not least my hon. Friends the Members for Lewisham East (Heidi Alexander) and for Lewisham West and Penge (Jim Dowd), and my right hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham, Deptford (Dame Joan Ruddock)—but they won because the Secretary of State for Health acted outside the law.
Clauses 55 to 60 will give protection to such unlawful acts in the future. That is why Labour wholly opposes the proposals for judicial review, and wishes judicial review to be preserved as an essential check on Executive power, as does every serious judicial and professional body that has spoken on the matter. Lord Dyson, the Master of the Rolls, has said that
“there is no principle more basic to our system of law than the maintenance of the rule of law itself and the constitutional protection afforded by judicial review”.
The former Lord Chief Justice Lord Woolf has said:
“In our system, without its written constitution embedded in our law so it can’t be changed, judicial review is critical.”
He added that the Ministry of Justice, is showing a
“remarkable lack of concern for the precision of the facts”.
Lord Pannick has said:
“It is ironic that judicial review now needs protection from a politician whose reforms would neuter its force by the use of political slogans that have no factual basis and are ignorant of legal and constitutional principle.”
Most recently, the Joint Committee on Human Rights—I am pleased that its Chair, my hon. Friend the Member for Aberavon (Dr Francis), is in the Chamber to take part in the debate—found no merit in any of the Government’s arguments. Its report stated:
“We…do not consider the Government to have demonstrated by clear evidence that…judicial review has ‘expanded massively’ in recent years as the Lord Chancellor claims, that there are real abuses of the process taking place, or that the current powers of the courts to deal with such abuse are inadequate.”
The truth is that any problems in the administrative court that were caused by the growth in the number of judicial reviews in the area of immigration were resolved by transferring such cases to the immigration tribunal. The process of rationalising the tribunals system, which we started in government, is continuing with the setting up of the planning court.
The first group of new clauses and amendments complement that approach by bringing planning challenges in line with the processes for judicial review in respect of leave and time limits. First, certain decisions may be challenged only by a statutory review, but leave is not required to bring a challenge. The leave of the High Court will now be required in such cases. Secondly, challenges to costs awards will be dealt with as part of
the statutory review of a decision. Thirdly, the six-week challenge period will be calculated from the day after the decision is taken. Those practices are more restrictive than the current ones, but we do not oppose them, on the basis that they are tidying proposals that are consistent with other processes that are in place.
I will move on to the amendments that appear in my name and that of my hon. Friend the Member for Barnsley Central (Dan Jarvis). We do not support any of the Government’s proposed restrictions in clauses 55 to 60, which we seek to leave out of the Bill. As there will not be time to vote on every amendment, however, we will seek to divide the House on removing the two most immediately damaging proposals. Amendment 23 would delete clause 55, which is known as the highly likely test, and amendment 35 would delete clause 58, which imposes costs on interveners. It seems to us that that is the clearest and most thorough way to improve the Bill, but, for completeness, we also support the other amendments in the group that have been tabled by the Chair of the Joint Committee on Human Rights and others to amend the existing clauses to similar effect.
Clause 55 requires that, where a respondent asks, the court should consider whether, had the relevant authority acted lawfully, it would be
“highly likely that the outcome for the applicant would not have been substantially different if the conduct complained of had not occurred.”
Our belief, which is shared by the Joint Committee, is that that reveals a significant lack of understanding about the purpose of administrative law and the function of judicial review. It confuses unlawfulness with remedy and will encourage bad decision making by the Executive. We want the status quo to prevail. That is, the test should be whether the same outcome would be inevitable. Amendment 23 would leave out clause 55 entirely. The alternative amendments, amendments 24 to 32, would restore the status quo. All those amendments have the support of the Joint Committee in its report.
Amendments 33 and 34 would leave out clauses 56 and 57. Those clauses require the court to consider whether to make an order for costs against any organisation or individual beyond the applicant. Justice, the civil liberties group, gave troubling examples of how those proposals may have a chilling effect. If a charity obtains a donation for the purposes of pursuing litigation, will the court be capable of enforcing a costs order against the donor for any sum? What will happen if a solicitor or law centre acts pro bono when a claimant is unable to secure legal aid? Will family members who support litigation brought by a vulnerable or disabled relative who is seeking to challenge the withdrawal of services be affected? Those questions have not been satisfactorily answered and the changes that are proposed in clauses 56 and 57 should be better defined before Parliament approves them.
Clause 58 states that third parties such as non-governmental organisations, charities and human rights organisations—all those who regularly intervene in judicial reviews—will face orders for costs against them on an application by any party, except in exceptional circumstances. That the Government would target interveners in that way is both chilling and counter-productive. The role of interveners is most often to assist the court, and the most frequent interveners are
organisations such as Liberty and Justice, whose expertise has proven invaluable in many cases. Often, in an adversarial system, it is only the intervener who identifies the core issue for the court to decide.
Opposition amendment 35 would leave out clause 58. Amendments 36 and 37 would have much the same effect by restoring judicial discretion as to costs. The hon. Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert) and others have tabled amendments on this subject. I hope that they will see the force of the argument for voting out clause 58, which would have much the same effect as their amendments. I do not think that we need to split hairs over this matter.
Clauses 59 and 60 place the making of protective costs orders on a statutory footing. Opposition amendments 38 to 40 and 42 agree with the views of the JCHR, which concluded that restricting PCOs to cases where permission for judicial review had already been approved was
“too great a restriction and will undermine effective access to justice.”
It also rejected the
“need for the Lord Chancellor also to have the power to change the matters to which the court must have regard when deciding whether proceedings are public interest proceedings.”
Clause 61 purports to give protection in costs in environmental cases, as required by the Aarhus convention. Although we do not oppose that, we believe that the proposal is flawed because it is not comprehensive and because the precise effect of this important issue is left to the Secretary of State by way of regulations. Opposition new clause 53 would remedy those defects.
Taken as a whole, these changes are designed to hobble judicial review to such an extent that its true purpose—to hold the state to account—may be severely weakened, if not lost. That is an extraordinary position for a Lord Chancellor to take. We know that he is the first non-lawyer to hold the post of Lord Chancellor in more than 300 years, but he must brush up on his British constitutional history. Now that the Secretary of State for Education has stopped the circulation of the Prime Minister’s copies of Magna Carta to schools, there must be a lot of copies lying around in Downing street. The next time the Lord Chancellor is there—unless it is for the reshuffle—perhaps he should read a copy. He will find the memorable words:
“We will sell to no man, we will not deny or defer to any man either Justice or Right.”
Upholding the rule of law and allowing the citizen to challenge the state and other powerful interests are at the heart of our constitution. Judicial review became, in the 20th century, an effective tool for effecting those rights. It is that which the Government now seek to fetter.