I will speak in particular about clause 58 on interveners, about which the hon. Member for Hammersmith (Mr Slaughter) has just spoken, and about amendment 51, which I tabled. I spoke about this issue in some detail in Committee and my view has not changed. In the interests of other Members, I will not go through every single argument that was made in Committee.
There is no doubt that interveners are a positive thing. We should welcome them in our legal system. Baroness Hale of the Supreme Court said:
“interventions are enormously helpful... They usually supply arguments and authorities, rather than factual information, which the parties may not have supplied.”
We should be grateful for that work and for the benefits that we receive.
The status quo does not allow just anybody to intervene. No organisation has a free right to intervene whenever it wants. It is up to a judge who intervenes. The judge can say, “Yes, I would like to hear from you. I don’t want to hear from you about this point. I would like to hear about that issue.” The judge has complete control. They can take lots of interventions or a small number. They can say how much information people are allowed to provide. The judge also has the right to invite somebody to intervene who has not even applied. A court can say, “We would very much like to hear from this person.” Judges therefore have huge discretion. Where there are abusive cases, judges already have the ability to say that they do not wish to hear from somebody.
We made some progress in Committee. We clarified that when a judge invites somebody to intervene, clause 58 will not apply to them. That is very important and it was not clear previously. It certainly was not clear to me and I do not think that it was clear to others. It would obviously be unreasonable to say, “The court has asked you to do something and now you must pay not only your costs, but everyone else’s costs for the privilege.”
I am yet to meet an organisation that intervenes that particularly wants its costs to be covered. That is not the way it usually works. Such organisations accept that they should pay their own costs. What they are concerned about—quite rightly—is the idea that they should have to pay the unenumerated costs of other people. They will have no idea at the beginning of a case how much those costs are likely to be. There could be a very high bill and that will have a chilling effect.
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The case the Minister has put repeatedly—as I am sure he will do later—is that there are abusive cases such as when, for example, an organisation finds somebody typically impecunious to front-up a case for judicial review. The organisation then intervenes to make the case, but it knows that the costs cannot be met because the individual is impecunious—I hope the Minister will agree that that is the description he has given. If there are such cases, they are an attempt to avoid the normal rules—fiddling a judicial review—and I share concerns about that. I would be interested to hear how many such cases there have been.
There are, however, many other cases where interveners do not act. In some cases, interveners are intervening on and helping with a specific, exact case, which we should welcome and support. There are also instances where interveners help with a specific case and highlight a general case. To take the example of a child who is not getting support from the local authority—I am aware of many such cases—the problem is not only that that child is not getting help, but that many other children do not receive help. It would be helpful for local authorities and the justice system for everybody to know the rules. We should not just fix one wrong; we must make clear how the system ought to work.
I took a particular interest in the S and Marper case in which Liberty intervened. When it intervened in the Court of Appeal, Lord Sedley said that he found the written submission “of great assistance”— it was a written submission, so it should not have taken long in court—and that the distinction was “crucial” to what the Court had to decide. That was not because of the individuals involved, but because of a broader general issue.
I reject completely the idea that, as I think the Justice Secretary said, such cases are brought only by “left-wing lawyers”—left-wing lawyers such as the Countryside Alliance, the Daily Mail, The Daily Telegraph, the Treasurer of UKIP, Conservative peer Lord Rees-Mogg, and various Conservative councils. All sorts of people make use of the powers for good reason.
In Committee I proposed an amendment to remove clause 58, as that seemed the cleanest and simplest way to keep to the status quo and retain judges’ ability to intervene. Since then, I have accepted that there may be some abusive cases where the current system does not quite work, and although judges still have such power, I accept the argument that in those rare cases something could be changed.