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Lords debate judicial review restrictions
The House of Lords debated a motion to regret, tabled by crossbench peer Lord Pannick QC, ‘that the Civil Legal Aid (Remuneration) (Amendment) (No 3) Regulations 2014 [SI No 607] make the duty of the Lord Chancellor to provide legal aid in judicial review cases dependent on the court granting permission to proceed’ early this month. The regulations, which were approved by parliament in March and came into force on 22 April, mean that the work involved in preparing and issuing judicial review claims will no longer be paid for unless permission is granted. The Legal Aid Agency can, though, exercise a discretionary power to grant legal aid and has produced guidance on this.
The Joint Committee on Human Rights has published a paper which is scathing of the government’s changes, and describes the evidential base for them as being ‘weak’. Dr Hywel Francis, chairpersom of the committee, which is made up of peers and MPs, said that while the committee recognised that there ‘has been an increase in judicial review cases’, it believed that ‘it would have been prudent for the government to wait until recent changes to how immigration cases are dealt with made clear whether this increase was going to continue’.
Dr Francis also strongly criticised the conflict in the ‘combined roles of the Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice’. He called for a ‘complete review of the implications of combining in one person these roles, and of the current structure of departmental responsibilities between the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice’.