Criminal Justice and Courts Bill

Lord Horam Excerpts

Wednesday 21st January 2015 Lords Chamber

Every time this Lord Chancellor addresses judicial review, he contradicts that essential guidance. I am very pleased that this House has performed its role in requiring the House of Commons and the Lord Chancellor to think again, and in securing acceptable compromises that will enable judicial review to continue to perform its valuable and essential functions.

[Lord Horam (Con)]

I would like to comment on the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Pannick. He said that this has been something of a saga. It has indeed been a saga, albeit, as I think he would agree, a highly intelligent and rationally argued one on all sides. The reason it has been a saga is that there is a real issue here: on the one hand we value the role of judicial review, which, as he rightly says, is a protection for the citizen against illegal and wrong actions by the Government, and it is important that that is kept in place, but on the other hand, unfortunately, in recent years an abuse of judicial review has crept in in many areas. We have heard at some length the sort of examples where that has taken place. To give one example, the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, had tremendous difficulties with the introduction of the academy programme when he was Minister for Education in the previous Government, because of the judicial reviews that were brought in against that particular idea, and it took him some years for that all to be sorted out.

At the moment these problems are concerned not so much with education or issues of that kind but with development. Many schemes up and down the country to provide more houses, roads, commercial opportunities, schools and hospitals are held up by judicial reviews that are usually—indeed, very often—almost without merit and are brought forward on tiny issues of procedure. These judicial reviews are used as a weapon of delay, which is something that any Government, Labour, Conservative or coalition, should be concerned about.

There has been an issue of getting the right balance between on the one hand protecting the legitimate and longstanding use of judicial review, and on the other avoiding this abuse of judicial review, particularly using it as a weapon of delay for infrastructure development. This is an important issue, so important that not only are the Government concerned about it but the Opposition are using their day tomorrow to talk about the need for more infrastructure development. It is a common cause for all Governments, frankly, that we get infrastructure development—I am sorry that that is such an ugly phrase, but the House knows what I mean—going with some speed, because we are falling behind. We are 24th in the world league for infrastructure development, whereas we are fifth in the economic league, so we are well behind where we should be in terms of building roads, houses and all the rest of it, and we need to move that on. The truth is that judicial review has sometimes been used in a very unfortunate way to delay that sort of development.

My noble friend has had the difficult task of getting some sort of balance into this debate, and that it why it has taken some time for this House and the other House to reach a conclusion. A conclusion has, I hope, now been reached, and that reflects good will on all sides of the House. I hope that what has been achieved will be of value and do some good. When we pass legislation in the House, we unfortunately never know exactly what effect it will have, but I hope this will have some effect and I therefore pray that the effort that has gone into it on all sides of the House and at the other end of the corridor will be of good value.

[Lord Woolf]

I also share the hope expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Horam, that what has been achieved will be worth while. However, I am bound to say that my view originally was that these proposals to restrict the court’s powers in relation to judicial review were unnecessary and misplaced. On the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Horam, I should point out that these amendments would not have assisted in any way whatever. What has assisted is the fact that the courts, aware that there are problems in some areas of judicial review, and of their own motion, put in place a specialist way of dealing with the questions of development to which the noble Lord referred. That is quite independent of these amendments. None the less, the changes that have been achieved to the original proposals enable me, like the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, to accept that this can be accepted, although with reluctance.