Tag: Cuts Cases

Understanding Parliamentary Purpose – Rights of Women, Statutory Interpretation and the Constitution

Civil legal aid is now available in such a limited category of cases that most practising lawyers will rarely (if ever) encounter it. So there is a risk that the interesting constitutional issue at the heart of the recent judgment in Rights of Women v The Lord Chancellor will fail to get the recognition it deserves.

In that case, the Court of Appeal declared unlawful a set of regulations that would have significantly limited the ability of victims of domestic violence to obtain legal aid. This briefly made the news headlines, before being displaced by the even bigger legal story of the same day, the Supreme Court’s conclusion (in Jogee) that the courts had been misapplying the law on criminal joint enterprise for the past thirty years.

However, aside from the importance of its impact in domestic abuse cases, Rights of Women is worth a second look because of its wider interest to anyone involved in making, relying on, or seeking to challenge delegated legislation.

Continue reading Understanding Parliamentary Purpose – Rights of Women, Statutory Interpretation and the Constitution

Return of the Cuts, Lessons from the Cuts Cases

Successive waves of public sector spending cuts imposed by UK central government since 2010 have generated a series of judicial reviews – the ‘cuts cases’. Many of these are challenges to the difficult choices that local authorities have had to make in reducing the provision of public services to stay within their shrinking budgets.

The cases are interesting not because they present a coherent narrative – they do not, although they certainly exhibit persistent themes – but because they test the boundaries of territory into which the courts have traditionally been reluctant to tread; namely whether to quash, on public law grounds, decisions which are driven by the need to allocate scarce resources between competing demands. As such, they tell us something about the considerable capabilities, but also the ongoing limits, of modern judicial review.

On 25 November 2015, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, revealed the next wave of public sector ‘austerity’ at more or less the same time as a number of earlier cuts cases were receiving judgment. Both offer us some useful pointers to the future.

Continue reading Return of the Cuts, Lessons from the Cuts Cases