My Lords, I fully support the noble Baroness’s Amendments 9 and 11. It seems to me that the Bar Council is absolutely right to draw a distinction between the nature of rules specifying what decisions can be made by authorised persons and the question of whether such decisions made by authorised persons should be subject to a review.
The noble and learned Lord was good enough to circulate to us not only the draft statutory instrument that he mentioned but the policy statement in support of it. It is quite clear that the procedure rule committees will be responsible for making the decision as to what decisions should be made by authorised persons: that is, the Criminal Procedure Rule Committee, the Family Procedure Rule Committee and the Civil Procedure Rule Committee. Of course, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Neuberger, is right to point out that those rule committees make rules that are both subject to scrutiny by Parliament and subject to approval by the Lord Chief Justice. However, that does not have a bearing on the question of whether decisions, once made, should be reviewable.
I commend these two amendments because they set a simple and short time limit of 14 days for making the application for review, and a further 14 days only for the decision upon that review. Furthermore, I believe that there is some benefit to be gained from uniformity, so that all such decisions made by authorised persons are subject to the same time limits and the same procedure. It seems to me that to have different rules for different types of decisions would be a mistake.
I would of course expect that, in due course, the review provisions would be implemented by applying a test that the decision of an authorised person would be overturned only if it was outwith the range of reasonable responses to the question posed to the authorised person—the traditional appellate test, rather than a fundamental review test. Subject to that, it seems to me that to give an authorised person an unappealable, unreviewable power to make what will sometimes be very important decisions, even if they are sanctioned by the rules, would be going too far. So I support these amendments.