My right hon. Friend takes a particular interest in these matters, and we are ad idem—as lawyers would say—on the subject. I think we can achieve a significant saving in time. For example, it will no longer be necessary to bring parallel applications for judicial review and costs, and that will save time and costs, because it is clearly a disincentive to have to bring two separate sets of legal proceedings. Even if they are later consolidated for the purpose of the hearing, costs are involved.
My right hon. Friend makes the important point that there will be a saving in terms of costs to the litigants—the potential proponent of a scheme and those who might have cause to object—and a hidden opportunity-cost saving to the Courts and Tribunals Service. Even if the hearings are ultimately consolidated, there is an administrative burden on the courts in processing the parallel matters. Significant sums—reckoned to be in the millions of pounds—can be saved. That may not seem like a massive amount in the overall scheme of things, but it will be valuable.
I also hope that the proposals will help to change the culture. That is an important point that my right hon. Friend and I have talked about in the past. Litigants in planning matters will be encouraged to resolve matters at the earliest possible opportunity and bring forward cases that have been sensibly brought together.
The setting up of the planning court has been warmly welcomed by the profession, but it has one concern that my hon. Friend the Minister might take back to the Lord Chancellor—and, through him, to the Lord Chief Justice—about the supply of judicial material, if I may put it that way, for the courts. There are a limited number of experienced judges and deputy judges in planning work. Now that we have this new, improved and streamlined structure, it is important that we have sufficient judicial personnel to man the court to carry out the process adequately. It is a rarefied and specialist sphere, although I regret to say that it is not one that I practised at the Bar—probably to my disbenefit, and certainly to the disbenefit of my bank manager. The pupillage in criminal chambers came through before the pupillage in planning chambers that I had also applied for, so I ended up in the same boat as the Under-Secretary of State for Justice, my hon. Friend the Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Jeremy Wright)—as a criminal practitioner.
One further point on planning may be a deliberate or passing omission. I wish to check with the Minister whether he intends to look, in due course, at the time frame for proceedings under section 113 of the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004. It would seem logical to try to deal with those matters at the same time, and I hope that it will be possible. That does not appear in the new clause and schedule, which encompass most of the other matters, but perhaps it can be considered in the other place. It relates generally to development plan challenges, which we have not discussed, and I accept that it would raise broader issues, but it may be appropriate to return to the subject at a future point.
The unanimity across the House on planning matters may end when we come to the issue of judicial review. I am afraid that I cannot accept the overblown and overstated arguments made by the Opposition spokesman on that issue. Of course judicial review is important, but it is worth putting it into context. Before I unwisely took the criminal pupillage instead of the planning pupillage, I was a young law student at the London School of Economics in the days of the great John Griffith, who was professor of public law. Judicial review was a virtually unheard-of concept. Although the prerogative orders of mandamus and certiorari go back to the common law, judicial review was scarcely ever used.
It is interesting, and ironic given the stance taken by the Labour party, that the growth of judicial review in its modern form is sometimes dated to the judicial
activism of the late Lord Denning at the tail end of the Wilson Government in the ’70s. It was a Labour Attorney-General, the late Sam Silkin, to whom Lord Denning addressed the famous words:
“Be you never so high, the law is above you.”
There were legitimate grounds for extending the jurisdiction. It is ironic, therefore, that the Labour party now seeks to pose itself as the proponent and supporter of unrestricted judicial review. That was certainly not the view of the Labour Government in the 1970s.
None the less, things have moved on. Judicial review is essentially an issue of proportion. I very much doubt that Lord Denning envisaged the concept of judicial review developing from the way he had in mind in that very famous case. There is a real concern—I have seen it as a lawyer, in my time as Local Government Minister and, before that, as a local councillor—that the growth of judicial review has become an inhibitor to good decision making, rather than, as suggested by the hon. Member for Hammersmith, being a tool to ensure good decision making. I suggest that the reverse has been the case. A number of examples of that can be given.
Let me start at the decision-making level within Government and local authorities. The growth of judicial review has encouraged a culture of risk-aversion in decision taking. All too often, good and honest civil servants and local government officers are restricted in taking what can sometimes be bold courses of action. Ministers can sometimes be counselled against taking bold and radical action because of the risk of judicial review. That harms the governmental process, rather than improving it.