Judicial Review and Courts Bill

Lord Howard of Lympne Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 7th February 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howard of Lympne (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble and learned Lord, Lord Brown, with whom I crossed swords in the courts on a number of occasions many moons ago. I join others in welcoming the noble Lord, Lord Hacking, with whom I often debated in the Cambridge Union even longer ago.

I shall restrict my remarks to the first part of the Bill. I should perhaps give an advance warning that I shall, as is often my wont, strike a discordant note in your Lordships’ deliberations on these issues. I want to preface what I say by making one key distinction, which I am afraid puts me at odds with my fellow Petrean, the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford. Those of us who have reservations about the growth in judicial review in recent years are sometimes accused of attacking the rule of law. That criticism is entirely misconceived. I yield to no one in my respect for the rule of law, as I hope I demonstrated in my opposition to the Governments internal market Bill. The issue to which the growth of judicial review gives rise is not the rule of law but rather who makes the law. Who is to have the final say on the laws which govern us? Is it to be Parliament, the traditional repository of sovereignty, and, at least as far as the other place is concerned, democratically elected and so accountable to the people, or the judges of the Supreme Court, unelected, unaccountable and the product of a process which in many ways resembles a self-perpetuating oligarchy?

There can be no doubt that judicial review has increased beyond recognition in size and scope over the last 50 years. Both the report of the Review of Administrative Law and Professor Richard Ekins, in one of his many persuasive papers for Policy Exchange’s Judicial Power Project, quote from the introduction to De Smith on administrative law, the standard textbook, which says:

“Public authorities are set up to govern and administer, and if their every act or decision were to be reviewable on unrestricted grounds by an independent judicial body the business of administration could be brought to a standstill. The prospect of judicial relief cannot be held out to any person whose interests may be adversely affected by an administrative action”.


Those words may be regarded as a classic description of what judicial review used to be. But the last time they appeared in De Smith’s book was in 1973. Indeed, as early as 1980 its editor noted,

“a steady increase in the readiness of the courts to intervene”.

Since then, there has been in the words of words of the noble and learned Lords, Lord Neuberger and Lord Clarke, and the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Hale, an explosion of judicial review, and one that has taken place without any parliamentary authority. That this explosion has led the Supreme Court into conflict with Parliament cannot be in doubt. My noble friend the Minister and others have dealt with the Cart case and the Bill makes provision for its reversal. But the case of Privacy International is very similar. In that case it was the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, a specialist court set up to make decisions on sensitive issues relating to national security, which Parliament had sought to protect from judicial review. The Supreme Court set aside that protection and the case is particularly noteworthy for the speech of Lord Carnwath, with whom I once shared a set of chambers. Lord Carnwath said that, if an ouster clause is expressed so clearly as being incapable of being interpreted not to prevent judicial review, it would be open to the courts to decline to give effect to such legislation. A more direct or naked challenge to the principle of parliamentary sovereignty it is difficult to imagine.

Then, of course, we have the two Miller cases, in which the Supreme Court paid lip-service to the supremacy of Parliament and even claimed to be ensuring that Parliament had a say. But Parliament does not need the intervention of the courts to have a say. If the other place had wished to prevent the Prime Minister from exercising the prerogative to prorogue Parliament, it could have done so. If the other place had wished to insist on a vote on Article 50 before it was activated, it could have done so. Of course, the court, in its prorogation case, was only able to reach its decision by the most blatant distortion of the Bill of Rights, which provides that

“proceedings in Parliament ought not to be impeached or questioned in any court or place out of Parliament.”

Prorogation is an event that takes place in your Lordships’ House and which Members of the other place are invited to witness. It is clearly a proceeding in Parliament. The judgment of the Supreme Court stated that the Bill did not apply because prorogation did not involve any decision of Parliament. I venture to suggest that the drafters of the Bill of Rights had as great a command of the English language as Lady Hale. If they had wanted their prohibition to apply only to those proceedings which involved a decision, they could and would have said so. There are many other cases in a similar vein which I do not have time to mention.

Why does all of this matter? It matters because accountability is the key to democracy. Members of the other place are accountable to the electorate. Judges are not. I stood for election to the other place on eight occasions—twice unsuccessfully, six times successfully. On each of the five occasions when I stood for re-election, I had to account to my constituents for the actions I had taken in the previous Parliament. The judges are accountable to no one.

So, given that the only decision the Bill seeks to reverse is the decision in Cart, I find it deeply disappointing. The noble Lord, Lord Pannick, with whom I rarely agree on these matters, described it as minimalist. He was spot on. The Minister, in the other place, said that the Bill was not necessarily the Government’s last word on these issues. I certainly hope that is the case, but I am not holding my breath.