Category: Courts and the administration of justice

Boris Johnson did not “see off” Brenda Hale – so why did he say that he had?

 

On 25 July 2019 it was announced that Lady Hale would retire as President of the Supreme Court:

The retirement was to be on 10 January 2020.

This retirement was because of the operation of the mandatory retirement age for judges, which in the case of Lady Hale meant she had to retire by when she became 75 on 31 January 2020.

Lady Hale’s retirement by 31 January 2020 was thereby inevitable.

There was nothing she – or anyone else – could do about it.

This retirement announcement was made the day after a certain Boris Johnson, the now departing Prime Minister, took office.

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Yesterday the now departing Prime Minister Boris Johnson said in the House of Commons:

“With iron determination we saw off Brenda Hale and we got Brexit done.”

But it was not Boris Johnson and his government that “saw off Brenda Hale” but the Judicial Pensions Act 1959 (as amended and unamended by subsequent legislation).

So what did he mean?

In terms of practical litigation, the statement also makes no sense.

The two key Brexit cases that reached the Supreme Court under the presidency of Brenda Hale – known as Miller 1 and Miller 2 – were cases which the government lost.

Indeed, Miller 2 – which held that Boris Johnson’s attempt to prorogue Parliament was unlawful – was when that unconstitutional antic was “seen off”.

So presumably he does not mean that, either.

*

What I suspect he means is that he got “Brexit done” despite the various litigation attempts to shape, delay or frustrate Brexit.

The two Miller cases were, strictly speaking, constitutional cases where the judiciary upheld the rights of the legislature against executive overreach.

But the more ardent supporters of Brexit did not – and still do not – see it that way.

And there were certainly other – less well conceived – legal cases which sought to stop Brexit, such as the “Article 50 challenge” cases.

If this suspicion is correct, then Brenda Hale is being used by Boris Johnson as a shorthand for all the legal challenges and obstructions which were made to Brexit, real or imagined.

Or, alternatively, Brenda Hale is being used as a shorthand for all those constitutional checks and balances that prevented Boris Johnson doing as he wished with the ship of state.

If so, these interpretations would accord with something else the Prime Minister said yesterday:

“The Leader of the Opposition and the deep state will prevail in their plot to haul us back into alignment with the EU as a prelude to our eventual return.”

Perhaps it should not be a surprise that Boris Johnson would use the phrase “deep state” at the despatch box – a term used by certain political conspiracy theorists.

Perhaps him using that terms is an indication of the deep state we are actually in.

If the above is correct, then the meaning of what Johnson said yesterday is that he saw off the “deep state” in its judicial manifestation and got Brexit done, though the “deep state” in its other manifestations are now seeking to reverse Brexit.

This is not a healthy frame of mind.

And if this thinking (or lack of thinking) becomes more widely shared, it does not bode well for a healthy polity.

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Even if Boris Johnson was correct and that, in some meaningful way, he had “seen off” the President of the Supreme Court, then it would still be worrying that this was something any Prime Minister wanted to boast and gloat about.

Such gloating and boasting – well based or not – signifies a hyper-partisan approach to politics, the separation of powers and the rule of law.

As with other checks and balances in the constitution, Boris Johnson sees them as things to be defeated and for those defeats to be seen as personal triumphs.

Even though those who clap and cheer Boris Johnson in doing this would be the first to complain, from constitutional first principle, if an opposition politician such as Jeremy Corbyn or Keir Starmer did the same.

And imagine the sheer fury if any judge boasted and gloated that they had “seen off” Boris Johnson.

Boris Johnson’s conspiratorial hyper-partisanship is dangerous, and so it is a good thing that Boris Johnson is now going.

But just as Trumpism has continued in the United States even after Donald Trump’s departure from the presidency, the worry is that this Johnsonian frame of mind, with its deep state conspiracy-thinking and contempt for checks and balances, will linger.

For, if anything, that is what needs to be “seen off”.

***

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Of Partygate, questionnaires and police discretion – some footnotes to yesterday’s post

27th May 2022

The response to yesterday’s post – offering an explanation as to why the current Prime Minister only received one fixed penalty notice over ‘Partygate’ – was rather overwhelming.

The post was linked to by both the Guardian and Guido Fawkes – which must be rare – and commended by a former (proper) Lord Chancellor and a former Treasury Solicitor (the government’s most senior legal official) – and the post had over 12,000 hits.

The thing is that I do not know – could not know – if that explanation were true.

The current Prime Minister is entitled to legal advice and the protection of legal privilege – and, in a way, it is not a bad thing for a Prime Minister to have access to competent legal advice.

(The problem, of course, is that ready access to competent legal advice when facing criminal sanctions is something which everyone should be entitled – and that entitlement is under constant threat by government cuts to Legal Aid.)

The only merit of my explanation was that it explained the facts as we understand them better than any other explanation, without resorting to a conspiracy theory.

In an interesting thread today, the journalist Peter Walker has set out some useful background which also supports my suggested explanation.

https://twitter.com/peterwalker99/status/1530131395133284352

https://twitter.com/peterwalker99/status/1530132726048858112

The decision to issue a notice is not a judicial decision – no judge or court is involved.

The decision is made by a police officer, who must reasonably believe that an offence was committed.

The safeguard against people having sanctions based on just police discretion is that an individual can refuse to pay the penalty and, as the dreadful phrase goes, have their day in court.

Payment of a penalty also does not, by itself, constitute an admission to a criminal offence such that would, like accepting a caution, give you a criminal record.

If the police officer does not reasonably believe that an offence was committed then no notice will be – or should be – issued.

The suggested explanation I set out yesterday may not be compel a court or convince a jury or a judge – but that was not the test.

The suggested explanation had to be enough for a police officer not to reasonably believe that an offence had been committed.

And which police officer would gainsay that a senior minister had to perform an, ahem, ‘essential function’ of leadership of thanking staff and making them feel appreciated?

It was not much of an excuse, but it was enough for the job that it needed to do, and it looks like it did it.

*

But stepping back, there is a certain strangeness – if not idiocy – in investigating possible wrongdoing by questionnaire.

Especially if – as it seems – the questionnaires were not issued under caution (though I have not seen a copy of the actual questionnaires in question).

As any good regulatory lawyer would tell you – a regulator is only as good as the information to which it has access.

And so – as techies would say – Garbage In, Garbage Out (or GIGO).

The current Private Eye states that certain senior figures did not even return their questionnaires – or may have not completed all the answers.

From their perspective, that was prudent – even if maddeningly frustrating for the police and for those who wanted those who wanted the partying Downing Street staff and advisers to face sanctions.

One fears that senior figures – with access to competent legal advice – were advised not to complete or return the questionnaires, while more junior figures – not aware of their options and perhaps even trying to be helpful – basically wrote out their own fixed penalty notices.

If this is the case – and few will know for certain – then what was being actually sanctioned was not wrongdoing, but naivety.

And, if so, that would be one of many things which make ‘Partygate’ an unsatisfactory moment in our constitutional and political history.

*

Lastly, on questionnaires. here are the wise words of one of the greatest jurists never to be appointed as a judge, E. L. Wisty:

“… they’re not very rigorous. They only ask one question. They say ‘Who are you?’, and I got seventy-five percent for that.”

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Four possible consequences of Partygate

19th May 2022

Partygate, again.

Today the Metropolitan Police announced the end of their investigation.

This means that, in small part, the Partygate issue comes to an end.

But there are at least four things which may now flow from the circumstances of the unlawful gatherings at Number 10 during the pandemic.

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The first, of course, is publication of the Sue Gray report.

This unseen report now has many expectations loaded onto it.

It is useful to remind yourself of her terms of reference.

Whatever is – and is not – in her published report, it is more likely than not to be in accordance with these terms of reference.

It is also useful to remind yourself of her truncated interim ‘update’.

That update indicated – though not in any definite way – where there may be problems for Downing Street when the final report is published (see this blog’s previous post here).

Two paragraphs of the update, in particular, are worth reminding yourself of:

“ii. At least some of the gatherings in question represent a serious failure to observe not just the high standards expected of those working at the heart of Government but also of the standards expected of the entire British population at the time.

“iii. At times it seems there was too little thought given to what was happening across the country in considering the appropriateness of some of these gatherings, the risks they presented to public health and how they might appear to the public. There were failures of leadership and judgment by different parts of No 10 and the Cabinet Office at different times. Some of the events should not have been allowed to take place. Other events should not have been allowed to develop as they did.”

Whether the report leads to any political change – and whether it is, in fact, the timebomb suggested by the earlier post – is, of course, determined by politics and the remarkable capacity of the current Prime Minister to evade accountability.

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The second consequence of Partygate is – on the face of it – potentially more significant constitutionally.

This is the House of Commons committee’s investigation into whether the Prime Minister misled parliament.

Here a difficulty for the Prime Minister is not so much whether he realised the parties he attended were unlawful gatherings, but when he knew.

This is important because, as this blog has previously set out, it appears that the Prime Minister is not only under an obligation to put the record straight, but also to do so at the earliest opportunity.

This point was well explained by Alexander Horne in this thread:

Even if the Prime Minister did not realise at the time the gatherings were unlawful, he no doubt knew once he saw the Sue Gray report and/or was advised in response to the Metropolitan Police investigation.

The committee may perhaps find that Boris Johnson did tell parliament at the first available opportunity, or it may hold the rule somehow does not apply, or it may censure him.

Again, the political consequences of any censure – or sanction – are not predictable with the current Prime Minister.

But misleading the House of Commons and not correcting the record as soon as one can are still serious matters, even in this age of Johnson, Brexit and 2022.

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A third possible consequence of Partygate is the worrying normalisation of politically motivated reporting of opponents to the police.

This blog recently set out this concern – and the concern has also been articulated by newspaper columnists:

This is an issue distinct from the obvious truth that politicians should not be above the law.

This issue is about when there is political pressure for there to be police intervention in respect of opponents, where such pressure would not be applied in respect of one’s own ‘side’.

Unless a report would be made to the police in the same circumstances when it was a political ally rather than an opponent, the report is being made on a partisan basis.

And routine goading of police involvement – and their coercive powers – on a partisan basis is not a good sign in any political system.

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The fourth possible consequence is more optimistic.

The covid regulations were an exercise in bad and rushed legislation, where – even accounting for it being a pandemic – insufficient care was given to the rules imposed and to how they were enforced.

This was pointed out at the time – by this blog and many other legal commentators.

The fact there was a pandemic was used as an excuse for shoddy drafting rather than it being the reason.

And part of the shoddiness was, no doubt, because these were seen by those in the executive as being rules for other people – that is, for the rest of us.

One perhaps positive thing about Partygate is that senior officials, politicians and advisers in the government now are aware that such rules can apply to them.

This may mean that in the event of another pandemic requiring similar rules, the provisions will have more anxious scrutiny before being put in palce and enforced.

That said, of course, it is perhaps also possible that the government will just make sure that future rules expressly do not apply to Whitehall.

But we have to take what possible positives that we can from this gods-awful governmentally-self-inflicted political, legal and constitutional mess, known as Partygate.

**

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What may be the real problem with the”Wagatha Christie” case

18th May 2022

The “Wagatha Christie” case is currently adding to the gaiety of the nation.

And as the wise Marina Hyde avers in her Guardian column, the case indicates the truth that one should avoid civil litigation wherever possible.

https://twitter.com/MarinaHyde/status/1525099409624686593

But as the legal journalist John Hyde points out in his Law Gazette blog, avoiding litigation is what litigation lawyers spend a lot of their time advising clients to do.

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Litigation is risky and expensive – and not only for the clients.

The notion that the lawyers will be dancing all the way to the bank whatever happens is not correct – some outcomes will not make them dance at all.

And, as this blog has previously pointed out, a high-profile and/or high-value civil trial usually means there has been a failure somewhere.

(In general, a civil trial is where one party sues another, as opposed to a criminal trial where the state prosecutes a party.)

This is because the process of civil litigation is geared towards settlement of a dispute before it reaches trial.

Trials – like battles – are expensive and unpredictable.

Trials also hand practical control of the case to a third party – the court.

So just as the prudent general seeks to prevail against their opponent without risking an open battle, so does the prudent civil litigator.

Civil litigators generally prefer to settle on the best possible terms than risk any trial.

This is especially true in a case where either the evidence or the law is stacked obviously in favour of one party and against the other.

On the face of it – the “Wagatha Christie” case is one-sided – at least in respect of what has been reported from court and the documents disclosed.

And few would say that the claimant has come out of the hearings well, on any view of the overall merits.

This is not a case that should ever have gone to trial.

So – how has such a case ended up in court?

One possible explanation is that the court reporting and publicly disclosed documents are misleading us onlookers, and that the case is finely balanced – and both sides are confident of victory.

This does happen in civil litigation sometimes – though usually be the time the two sides know the respective cases, and the evidence to be relied on, both the parties’ lawyers will usually have a common assessment of the merits of the claim.

A second explanation is that one or both of the parties is/are determined to have ‘their day in court’.

In other words: it is open to a client to disregard the advice of their lawyer to settle on the best possible terms.

And here, even if Rebekah Vardy wins the claim, she has lost overall.

There is a third explanation.

This is that the costs of the litigation – the various overall costs consequences and elaborate funding mechanisms – now mean that the parties are locked into a trial, as the chance of success outweighs the burden of costs they may incur.

In essence, the parties are going to trial because it would now be too expensive to settle.

You then have the spectacle of a trial going ahead which the parties probably do not want, the lawyers no doubt advised against, but it is now too expensive for settlement.

I do not know if this is what has happened in the ‘Wagatha Christie’ case – I will leave the detective work to the peerless Coleen Rooney.

But there has been a failure somewhere.

It is a mistake for onlookers to assume that the parties and the lawyers necessarily wanted this spectacle to go ahead – they may not have had an alternative once the case had got so far.

And so the problem is not necessarily the bad decisions of a party or the bad advice of lawyers, but a systemic problem with high-profile and/or high-value civil cases.

If so, then it is the civil litigation system that is adding to the gaiety of the nation, and not just the parties and their lawyers.

Charles Dickens would understand.

**

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The outlaw ministry

12th May 2022

From time to time on social media you will get people asking about the difference between something being ‘unlawful’ and being ‘illegal’.

And whenever this happens you will invariably get some wacky funster replying that the difference is that one means someone is acting outside the law and the other is a sick bird.

Ho ho, every time.

But.

The real problem with this government is not that it acts unlawfully or illegally.

The problem is that it acts as if it is an outlaw – that for the government, law does not apply in the first place.

It is not so much that the government cares about breaking any law, or about whether it has any legal basis for what it does.

Instead, the government does not see law as even applying to it.

To use a lovely Scottish word – the government acts as if it is ‘outwith’ the law.

The law applies to little people, and not this government.

‘Law and Order’ is a campaigning slogan, but not a principle of government.

As this blog has previously averred, this government engages in three types of lawlessness.

First, it often conducts itself without any lawful basis.

Second, it seeks to introduce legislation that will enable it to freely break the law.

Third, it permits law-breaking at the highest level.

It is difficult to imagine a government with less respect for law, and for the rule of law.

This is not so much a government of law breakers, but a government of outlaws.

The law is an inconvenience which can be disregarded as and when it is inconvenient.

Such an approach has its hedonistic attractions, but it cannot end well.

Brace, brace.

 

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This is not a proposal for “a Bill of Rights” – this is semi-waffle in support of vanity legislation

10th May 2022

Today it was announced in the Queen’s Speech that there will be a “Bill of Rights”.

Some are alarmed at this proposal – and warn darkly (and perhaps correctly) that this will be a fundamental attack on the Human Rights Act 1998 and on the protections we have under the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), to which that Act gives effect in domestic law.

One plausible consequence of the proposal is that there will no longer be a a law called ‘the Human Rights Act’ in our statute books.

This post, however, will take a sightly different approach.

This post is one more of derision than of alarm.

For the proposal set out today is all rather pathetic.

*

Let us start with the Queen’s Speech.

The relevant portion of the speech was this:

“My Government will ensure the constitution is defended. My Ministers will restore the balance of power between the legislature and the courts by introducing a Bill of Rights.”

There is already a Bill of Rights – at least in the law of England and Wales.

That law from 1688 or1689 (depending on how pedantic you affect to be) is famous and significant, and it is one of few ancient pieces of legislation that those with an interest in such things can name.

Any government bringing forward a new (or revised) Bill of Rights would presumably be proud, promoting the legislation as a highlight of its new parliamentary schedule.

But this latest “Bill of Rights”?

It was 800 words into a 940-word speech

Even in the accompanying briefing for journalists, it made only page 118 of a 140-page document.

The Bill is not so much an initiative, but an afterthought.

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And now we turn to content.

There is no real content.

The government has not published the proposed legislation, and indeed the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) is not in a position to publish the proposed legislation.

The MoJ told me today that the consultation on the reform only closed on 19 April and the responses are still being reviewed.

This lack of content can also be seen in the briefing note:

“The purpose of the Bill is to:

● Introduce a Bill of Rights which will ensure our human rights framework meets the needs of the society it serves and commands public confidence.

● End the abuse of the human rights framework and restore some common sense to our justice system.

The main benefits of the Bill would be:

● Defending freedom of speech by promoting greater confidence in society to express views freely, thereby enhancing public debate.

● Curbing the incremental expansion of a rights culture without proper democratic oversight, which has displaced due focus on personal responsibility and the public interest.

● Reducing unnecessary litigation and avoiding undue risk aversion for bodies delivering public services.

● Tackling the issue of foreign criminals evading deportation, because their human rights are given greater weight than the safety and security of the public.

The main elements of the Bill are:

● Establishing the primacy of UK case law, clarifying there is no requirement to follow the Strasbourg case law and that UK Courts cannot interpret rights in a more expansive manner than the Strasbourg Court.

● Ensuring that UK courts can no longer alter legislation contrary to its ordinary meaning and constraining the ability of the UK courts to impose ‘positive obligations’ on our public services without proper democratic oversight by restricting the scope for judicial legislation.

● Guaranteeing spurious cases do not undermine public confidence in human rights so that courts focus on genuine and credible human rights claims. The responsibility to demonstrate a significant disadvantage before a human rights claim can be heard in court will be placed on the claimant. 

● Recognising that responsibilities exist alongside rights by changing the way that damages can be awarded in human rights claims, for example by ensuring that the courts consider the behaviour of the claimant when considering making an award.”

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These three groups of bullet-points – ‘purpose…main benefits…main elements’ – indicate padding, and indeed the bullet-points are interchangeable between the sections.

Almost none of the bullet-points are concrete.

If anything they are almost all talking-points.

Some are semi-meaningless waffle – “restore some common sense” and “responsibilities exist alongside rights” are slogans rather than thoughts.

And to the extent any of these bullet-points do have meaning, their import is not to protect rights but to limit rights.

This is not a “Bill of Rights” but a Bill to, as far as possible, remove or restrict rights.

Only one bullet-point – and you can check if you doubt me – is even positive about substantive rights: “● Defending freedom of speech by promoting greater confidence in society to express views freely, thereby enhancing public debate”.

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Most significant of all – and this is what the government wants you to miss – is that this Bill of Rights will not substantially affect the position of the ECHR in the United Kingdom.

And this is because the Good Friday Agreement requires the United Kingdom to give effect to the ECHR in Northern Ireland.

If you look carefully at the proposals, there is mention of making sure the courts do not go further than the ECHR – “UK Courts cannot interpret rights in a more expansive manner than the Strasbourg Court” – but there is not (express) mention of getting rid of the ECHR in domestic law or any (express) suggestion that the United Kingdom follow Russia in leaving the Council of Europe.

So this proposal is, in part, an exercise in misdirection – an attempt to make it look like the government is ending the Human Rights Act but pretty much keeping the ECHR in domestic law.

*

Perhaps the government will put forward a Bill with more concrete proposals.

Perhaps the Lord Chancellor – facing chaos and crises in the court and prisons systems – will achieve his own political priority of replacing the Human Rights Act with some law that does much the same with a different name, but with added (and pointless) tinkering.

Perhaps any of this is worth the effort of new primary legislation – where (if needed) any changes could be done by amendment to the existing legislation.

Perhaps.

But.

The impression given by this proposal is that the new “Bill of Rights” is legislation for the mere sake of legislation.

None of the bullet-points – you can check – individually or together add up to the need for a new statute – let alone something with as hallowed and grandiose a title as a “Bill of Rights”.

On the face of today’s proposals, this is mere vanity legislation.

**

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The real problem with Beergate – and with Partygate

9th May 2022

There are many ways to look at the ‘Beergate’ political story – about the police investigation into what Leader of the Opposition did and did not do at (or after) a campaign function.

One way is to follow the political soap opera – and to ponder if the Leader of the Opposition will resign if he faces a penalty, if this will then backfire on the government supporters who have made this such a political story, and if voters will get tired and dismiss this and ‘Partygate’ with the shrug that says ‘they are all the same’.

Another way is to anxiously scrutinise the applicable law and to query whether the gathering was for work purposes or not.

And there is a third way, which requires stepping back to wonder if something more significant is going on.

Do ‘Partygate’ and ‘Beergate’ signify a shift in standard political tactics towards using reports to the police of one’s political opponents and encouraging investigations and sanctions?

For it is one thing to campaign against one’s political opponents.

But it seems another to actively seek that they face police attention.

Of course, from time to time – and in a society under the rule of law – politicians will get arrested, prosecuted, convicted and punished.

And that can be in respect of ‘political’ offences – such as regulate electoral matters – or more straightforward criminal activity.

Sometimes such investigations may have potentially important political implications – such as the cash for honours scandal about fifteen years ago, or the more recent parliamentary expenses scandals.

But in each of these cases, the involvement of the police seemed exceptional – and not part of the mundane, day-to-day politicking of Westminster.

And generally it seemed police involvement was not weaponised for political advantage (though there were one or two exceptions of minor Members of Parliament who liked referring matters to Scotland Yard).

Now, however, police involvement could not be more central to politics.

The fate of the Prime Minister and of the Leader of the Opposition depend, in part, on exercises of police discretion.

Not even a court is involved – just decisions of police officers as to whether it is reasonable to believe covid rules were broken.

(It would only become a matter for the courts if those police decisions are not accepted.)

Perhaps all this is just a one-off – just an extraordinary result of intrusive pandemic regulations that are no longer in place.

Or perhaps this marks a shift to using police involvement as a regular aspect of political activity.

So before we get carried away – one way or another – with clamouring for penalties to be imposed on which politicians you like least, perhaps we should think about where this is going.

For it may not be a good place for our politics to go.

**

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The Lord Chancellor’s extraordinary tweet about the Tracey Connelly case

6th May 2022

Here is a tweet from the Lord High Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (and a qualified solicitor):

It is a tweet that goes to one of the most important issues for any constitution: the respective powers of the executive and the judiciary in individual legal cases.

Tracey Connelly, as is widely known, was the mother of Peter Connelly, who died in 2007.

In 2008 she was convicted of “causing or allowing the death of a child or vulnerable person” – though not of murder or manslaughter – and she was sentenced to indefinite imprisonment for public protection, with a minimum term of five years.

It was reported that the then Attorney General considered referring the sentence to the Court of Appeal for being unduly lenient – but it seems no such referral was ever made, no doubt because the sentence was appropriate for the offence for which Connolly was actually convicted.

(Steven Barker was also convicted of this and another offence involving another child – and in respect of Peter Connolly’s death the sentence was for twelve years.)

That minimum of five years for Tracey Connelly expired in 2013 – and it appears she was released on licence from 2013-15 – but almost ten years later she is in prison.

This is because the Parole Board has, until recently, repeatedly refused her parole.

As the parole specialist Andrew Sperling explains in this useful and important thread, the test for the Parole Board is preventative rather than punitive:

Sperling also helpfully sets out that the Ministry of Justice participated in the Parole Board’s deliberations.

The Ministry of Justice officials all supported Connolly’s release.

This is the Lord Chancellor’s very own department.

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The Lord Chancellor even had the opportunity to challenge the Parole Board decision – and that was rejected.

In a fully reasoned and detailed decision, each of the Lord Chancellor’s grounds for his application were rejected.

The judgment even contained these remarkable paragraphs:

Ouch.

The Lord Chancellor – seriously – instructed counsel to say that the Parole Board had not taken proper account of his views, but he did not and could not identify what those views were.

That is embarrassingly bad.

*

The Lord Chancellor now wants to do things differently.

He wants to be able, as a politician and a minister, to personally overturn decisions of the Parole Board even when his own department’s officials support release.

Presumably this would be a power that would be exercised in those few cases that are selected by the media to be notorious.

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What is the Lord Chancellor’s motivation for wanting a ministerial veto?

Here, again, Sperling is spot on:

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Let us look again at the extraordinary tweet of the Lord Chancellor:

There is no sensible doubt that the cruelty in the Connolly case was substantial and warranted significant punishment.

And the court sentenced her for that offence.

A sentence which the government did not (and probably could not) challenge at the time as being unduly lenient.

The question is whether it is now safe for Tracey Connelly now to be released.

That question has been considered, with reference to relevant material, by the Parole Board, an independent body, with input from the Lord Chancellor’s own officials.

An answer was then reached by the Parole Board, which the Lord Chancellor could and did challenge in court, and the the Parole Board’s answer survived that challenge.

And the answer the Parole Board reached was ‘yes’.

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The issue is not that the executive should not have any role in questions of sentencing and probation in individual cases.

The executive should and does have a role.

The executive can refer seemingly unduly lenient sentences to the Court of Appeal.

The executive can make representations and submissions to the Parole Board.

The executive can apply so as to challenge a decision of the Parole Board.

This is how the separation of powers should and does work in practice.

Punishments should not be at the personal fiat of any minister, even that of the Lord High Chancellor.

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The suggestion that the Prime Minister give evidence to the privileges committee under oath and pain of perjury

2nd May 2022

Did you know there is a Parliamentary Witness Oaths Act?

This 1871 statute – which is still in force – provides among other things that any committee of the House of Commons may administer an oath to the witnesses examined before such committee.

And, while an examination of witness by a parliamentary committee is not a judicial proceeding, it would still be perjury for a person to lie such an oath (or affirmation) – with the penalty being up to seven years in prison.

This information comes from a fascinating and informative article at the New Statesman by Alexander Horne, a former parliamentary legal adviser.

In that article Horne contends that such an oath could be administered to the Prime Minister for any evidence he gives to the privileges committee.

If so. this would mean that the Prime Minister would be (to use the glorious legal phrase) ‘under pain of perjury’ to tell the truth to the committee investigating whether he deliberately misled parliament and/or failed to correct the record at the first available opportunity.

(The latter point is where this blog has previously set out that the Prime Minister is vulnerable, for it may be hard for him to maintain that once he had the Sue Gray report and/or any briefing for the Metropolitan police investigation that he still did not realise that he had misled parliament.)

On the face of it, administering such an oath has its attractions.

No sensible person doubts that the current prime minister lies fluently and repeatedly, and so placing him ‘under pain of perjury’ would have the advantage of concentrating his mind wonderfully.

Such an approach would also have the broader advantage of reminding the Prime Minister and others that evidence to parliamentary committees should be taken seriously – especially as the sanction of ‘contempt of parliament’ is, well, held in contempt.

Horne mentions where such oaths have been used:

“Committees rarely administer the oath to witnesses, although it has happened in recent years. The Home Affairs Committee chose to take evidence under oath in respect of its inquiry into child sexual exploitation in Rotherham. The Public Accounts Committee also controversially administered the oath to the general counsel and solicitor to the Inland Revenue in 2011.”

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But.

It may be one thing for witnesses who are not members of either house of parliament to give evidence to a parliamentary committee ‘under pain of perjury’ – but for a parliamentarian and minister to also do so is constitutionally problematic.

That what parliamentarians say in parliament is absolutely protected at law is set out (some would say ‘enshrined’) in the Bill of Rights.

And there is the principle that the responsibility of a minister to answer questions in parliament is politically enforceable (or not enforceable), and not a matter for any form of litigation.

Imagine if the Prime Minister (or other minister or parliamentarian) is caught out in a lie before a parliamentary committee, what would then happen?

(And the 1871 legislation does not expressly provide that parliamentarians are exempt.)

Would an outside court have to adjudicate the conduct of a parliamentarian in respect of parliamentary proceedings?

It is difficult to see how such a prosecution could be easily brought – and it could result in another (for constitutional commentators, splendid) constitutional mess.

And regardless of the legal(istic) issues in this particular situation, there is a sensible wariness of converting political issues into court matters.

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That said, however, it is unfortunate that there is so little that can be done to get the prime minister to give truthful answers in parliament.

This is certainly a constitutional problem that needs a practical solution.

The suggestion of getting a Prime Minister to give evidence to the privileges committee investigating him ‘under pain of perjury’ has the appearance of being such a solution to that problem.

The fear would be that in seeking go solve one constitutional problem, another is caused.

And so the problem remains: what can you do – constitutionally and practically –  with a dishonest Prime Minister?

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POSTSCRIPT

Horne has provided a link to a useful post where he deals with the issues in more detail:

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How one paragraph in the significant Covid and care homes judgment describes Matt Hancock’s lethal, unlawful policy

28th April 2022

One of the most outstanding lawyers I know works a lot with care home clients.

Sometime ago they told me about what happened when the hospitals started seeking to release patients into care homes at the start of the pandemic.

A hospital was trying to force a care home to take a potentially positive patient.

The lawyer advised their care home client to lock all the doors, and to not accept anyone from the hospital untested.

Robust advice yes – but it was a bleedingly obvious problem – and now the High Court has said, in effect, my friend’s legal advice was correct.

The Covid and care homes judgment handed down this week is long and complicated – 75 pages and 299 numbered paragraphs.

But one paragraph stands out – and goes to the heart of the relationship between policy on one hand and law on the other.

It is paragraph 289:

“Since there is no evidence that this question was considered by the Secretary of State, or that he was asked to consider it, it is not an example of a political judgment on a finely balanced issue. Nor is it a point on which any of the expert committees had advised that no guidance was required. Those drafting the March Discharge Policy and the April Admissions Guidance simply failed to take into account the highly relevant consideration of the risk to elderly and vulnerable residents from asymptomatic transmission.”

This is not an example thereby of a hard policy decision being made between competing options.

Most sensible people would say that is a matter for the government and not for the courts.

It was instead a decision which failed absolutely to take account of a relevant consideration.

As such, it was a policy decision that was not lawfully open to the decision-maker.

As those bringing the case set out, the secretary of state was the relevant decision-maker “and the public law duties fell on him personally to consider relevant considerations, exclude the irrelevant ones and be sufficiently informed”. 

How the court applied this legal principle in this case is interesting:

The court has held, in effect, that by the time the relevant guidance was issued, the risk of asymptomatic transmission was obvious and well-known – it was even being mentioned publicly by government scientific advisers.

But the government blithely put out guidance to care homes that did not even consider that risk, let alone provide for what care homes should have done to manage the risk.

The court elsewhere in the judgment rejects challenges on other grounds – and the court is careful to say that earlier stages of the pandemic, it would not have been fair or realistic for the government to have known that there was a risk.

But by the time of the April 2020 guidance, this was not the case – and the government could not pretend that was the case.

The government instead published guidance on which care homes were supposed to rely and did not care to consider the risk of asymptomatic transmission.

That took the decision out of the realm of administration and policy and into the realm of public law.

The judgment does not refer expressly to the famous Wednesbury principle, but this is an example of a decision so unreasonable no reasonable decision-maker could have made it.

And that is even after giving due latitude and deference to a government dealing with a pandemic – that offers no excuse to have got this guidance so completely – lethally – wrong.

Far from throwing their arms around the care home sector, the department of health instead threw their hands over their eyes.

And care homes should not have been placed in the dreadful predicament of having to decide whether it was safe to follow department of health guidance, or whether they should have locked their doors instead.

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