Wednesbury reform will not reverse the Cherry / Miller decision

Team Boris has turned to reform of judicial review, as I have argued they should several times over the last few months.  However a simple change to reassert the Wednesbury rules will not fix the system on its own. It will not overturn Lady Hale’s decision on the prorogation case (Cherry/Miller).

There is no avoiding going over old ground to some extent, but to avoid repeating everything I will refer to previous articles:

Few judicial reviews actually succeed (about 1%, plus some out-of-court settlements) and this has kept the procedure out of the headlines until the recent Gina Miller cases, which are the reason for the sudden interest in reform. There have been troubling decisions in past years though (as other articles outline), and it is just that their political impact was limited.

Even amongst the claims brought by ‘Remainiacs’, it is only the last decision, the prorogation case, which stands out as a wildcard decision, and one wrongly decided in the opinion of much of the legal profession.

The Wednesbury rules are the main focus of comment and are widely cited with approval. These are a good, principled set of rules for judging the propriety of administrative decisions where the authority is granted by statute and that statute intends that the powers be used for a particular purpose. Therefore a power of compulsory purchase granted to enable infrastructure projects should not be used instead to acquire land for property speculation, and a power to impose planning conditions should not be used to get the developer to provide a new, unrelated civic facility (which are both genuine examples).

However, the Wednesbury rules were invented by judges out of necessity for lack of any guidance from Parliament. As a result, the rules can be stretched by a judge who wants a particular result. Leading judgments emphasise that decision-makers make decisions by their own discernment and judges may not substitute their own ideas, but in other judgments a judge has found a perception of a flaw through which he may crawl to strike down a decision he does not like. All this is because Parliament has hitherto failed to do its duty in defining rules for the interpretation of the powers it has granted. It is for the authority granting a power, namely Parliament, to define what power it is granting.

Once the rules can be defined on the original, Wednesbury principles and Dicey’s concept of the rule of law, then mission-creep can be restrained. That still does not affect the Cherry/Miller case though.

A change in the law will not always change the judgments. Statute law is black and white, but it is interpreted by each judge. There are several examples of judges deciding that an Act passed to overturn a judgment has only really restated the existing law so no change is needed: in this you might think of the attempt to liberalise contempt of court after the Thalidomide case – the words “serious harm” are easy to read as “anything more than negligible harm”.

A point well made in the commentaries concerns interference with prerogative powers. This is not about making governments powerful but about the fundamental rule of law, which is a very Conservative concern. The Wednesbury Rules of reasonableness and purpose apply to delegated decisions because delegated authority is always limited authority, but the Royal Prerogative is primary power, not delegated, and so it should not judged by those limits, only by the actual extent of the power. Some judges have trespassed there, and each precedent invites a new trespass. That must be slapped down. It still does not affect the Cherry/Miller case though.

The Prorogation case of Cherry/Miller is unaffected by any Wednesbury reform.  Lady Hale was careful to word her decision not as a Wednesbury case nor as turning on reasonableness or proper purpose or what was said to The Queen, but as turning on a primary constitutional rule. This rule was hitherto completely unknown – or to put it plainly, she made up.

The Prorogation case is in a line of dangerous decisions treading on the common law constitutional understanding. It will be hard to ensure that no Hale-type usurpation takes place in the future, if judges are prepared to invent new rules, but curbing the tendency must help. This particular case would need a discrete rule, that “no common law rule limits Her Majesty’s authority to prorogue or dissolve Parliament nor the length of the prorogation or dissolution”. (No ifs; no buts: add any condition and you bring the whole Wednesbury apparatus into it.)

It is worrying if Parliament now has to think of constitutional fundamentals which some wild judge might think of overturning. It would be unthinkable for a court to invent a new condition to prevent Royal Assent to a Bill, for example, but an invented rule about prorogation that contradicts every textbook written in the last 500 years would have been unthinkable just a few months ago.

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Author: LittleHobb

Solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short