How many judicial review cases are received by UK government departments?

In a recent debate in Parliament, the secretary for justice Chris Grayling was unable to provide a number when asked how many judicial review cases are brought against government ministries. Ruth Dixon looks at the numbers, finding no evidence of an explosion of judicial challenges to central government departments.

Credit: Sam Howzit, CC BY 2.0

During a debate in parliament on 1 December, Chris Grayling (Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice) was asked how many judicial review cases are brought against government ministers.

Julie Hilling (Bolton West) (Lab): The right hon. Gentleman says “all the time”. Will he give us a notion of how often that is—once a day, once a week, once a month? How many times have such cases happened since April, for instance? He is giving the impression that they happen all the time, but what does that mean?

Chris Grayling: A Minister is confronted by the practical threat of the arrival of a judicial review case virtually every week of the year. It is happening all the time. There are pre-action protocols all the time, and cases are brought regularly. Looking across the majority of a Department’s activities, Ministers face judicial review very regularly indeed. It happens weeks apart rather than months apart.

The minister gave no actual numbers in his answer. So, in this post I’ve looked at how many judicial review (JR) cases were received by central government departments (‘ministers’) over the past few years. This analysis relates to my work in the Politics Department at Oxford. There is a good discussion of the wider issues raised by Chris Grayling’s responses during that debate by Mark Elliot on the Public Law for Everyone blog. In this post I just look at the numbers.

The number of JR cases received by each UK government department can be found in this database of JR cases from 2007 to 2012, which lists over 57,000 JR applications, giving the topic, defendant and outcome of each case. For this analysis, I corrected the data for misclassifications according to this revision note. (More recent JR databases are correctly classified, but do not report the defendants). The largest group of JR applications were Immigration and Asylum (IA) cases (almost 10,000 in 2012, or 80 per cent of the total). In the future IA cases will be almost entirely considered by tribunals, so I’m excluding them here (and in any case, they do not appear to be the type of case that the Justice Secretary was referring to).

There were just under 2500 ‘non-immigration’ cases per year, which is shown in the graph below and split into four broad categories of defendant: Criminal Justice System (e.g. courts, police, prisons), Local Authorities, Central Government Departments, and ‘Other’ (e.g. medical councils, schools, NHS and tribunals).

Central government departments received fewer than 500 JR cases each year, broken down by department as follows:

	2007	2008	2009	2010	2011	2012
BIS	11	5	4	5	4	5
Cabinet Office	0	1	0	2	4	3
DCLG	38	25	20	28	23	12
DCMS	1	0	0	0	2	0
DECC	0	0	2	5	11	2
DEFRA	21	40	25	12	18	15
Department for Education	5	3	2	9	6	10
Department for Transport	6	8	5	4	2	10
Department of Health	9	11	6	11	4	6
DWP	43	37	23	18	28	31
Foreign Office	0	3	5	3	1	1
HMRC	44	39	37	39	39	51
Home Office	92	50	54	53	48	39
MOD	12	10	19	24	11	8
Ministry of Justice	123	214	250	260	247	257
Treasury	2	7	6	2	5	3
Central Government Departments Total	407	453	458	475	453	453

Only four departments received more than 15 judicial review cases in 2012. By far the most were received by the Ministry of Justice (MoJ, 257), followed by HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC, 51), the Home Office (39) and Department for Work and Pensions (DWP, 31).

The topic ‘Prisons’ made up 70 per cent of MoJ cases, ‘Tax’ and ‘VAT’ comprised 90 per cent of HMRC cases; 80 per cent of DWP cases were about benefits and social security. No single topic dominated the Home Office non-IA cases (though this department also received the vast bulk of IA cases). The other ~20 Whitehall departments received an average of about 5 cases per year (a few received none over the six years and don’t appear in the table).

The information in the database is not detailed enough to identify the ‘politically motivated’ cases that particularly concern Chris Grayling. Planning is sometimes mentioned as an area in which JR is used to delay important infrastructure projects. In 2012 just 10 JR cases regarding ‘Town and Country Planning’ were addressed to government departments (9 to DCLG and 1 to DEFRA) compared with 188 addressed to local authorities.

Considering the vast numbers of government decisions that are made every year, we don’t see an explosion of judicial challenges to central government departments. The Ministry of Justice is a clear outlier, receiving more than half of all such cases (and another large tranch of cases is concerned with the wider criminal justice system). Perhaps the minister should look at the quality of decision-making in his own department and its agencies before seeking to limit judicial review.

—

This post originally appeared on the LSE Politics and Policy blog, having been reposted from Ruth Dixon’s blog, My Garden Pond,

Note: This post gives the views of the author, and not the position of the Democratic Audit UK, nor of the London School of Economics. Please read our comments policy before posting.

—

Ruth Dixon has worked at the Department of Politics and International Relations at Oxford University since 2006.