Worth reading this response by the Administrative Law Bar Association to the current government’s latest consultation on “reform” to judicial review. adminlaw.org.uk/wp-content/upl…
(Disclosure: I had a very minor hand in it - but not in any of the paragraphs I’m going to quote.)
Opening salvo. The current government’s description of the findings of the independent review is simply false, in critical respects.
Opening comments on the proposal to make JR remedies “prospective only”.
Unimpressed with the quality of drafting and analysis in the consultation paper.
Why there should be no presumption against annulment of statutory instruments found to be in excess of Ministers’ powers: the Parliamentary veneer on them fails to conceal that they are exercises of executive power with no real Parliamentary scrutiny.
On muddled proposals on ouster clauses (muddled but generally tending towards making it easier to defend them.)
(“Ouster clauses” are provisions that try to restrict judicial review of certain decisions.)
Why Conservatives really need to reflect before suggesting that ouster clauses are a good idea.
(I enjoyed “specific and limited”.)
But there’s plenty more here: a comprehensive demolition of a set of proposals that managed, in critical respects, to be simultaneously incoherent and sinister.
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The 🐘 in the room that it fails to confront (though sometimes hints at): that companies operate in a world where the public expects them to uphold standards in conduct and recruitment and they will suffer *commercially* if they don’t.
An example is the hand-wringing discussion of the growth of ESG funds that simply fails to explain why they’ve grown (the obvious answer being the inconvenient one that they respond to public demand).
Others - see eg - have dealt with the “no big negative impact” claim here (and it isn’t “assume”: it’s looking at the evidence and applying standard analysis). But a couple of points on “and so little use has been made of the opportunities [Brexit] offers”
The current government has taken - in rafts of legislation since 2019 - enormous powers to change EU regulatory rules. That was so even before the Retained EU Law Act (REULA) gave them even greater powers to do so, largely without needing to involve Parliament.
Have they used them? Despite the huge political pressure on them, and every incentive on individual ministers, to find “Brexit opportunities”, hardly at all.
The concerns set out by @GeorgeMonbiot here have powerful and authoritative backing from the 2022 @CMAgovUK report into children’s care. Its conclusion:
Since then, the inability of the children in care system to deal adequately with children in care with complex needs has led to an explosion in “Deprivation of Liberty Orders” (DOLs) - so many that there is now a special court to deal with them. judiciary.uk/launch-of-nati…
Some brief comments on the European Commission’s proposal to get a mandate to negotiate a youth mobility agreement with the UK. ec.europa.eu/commission/pre…
1. The EU is not there yet. The mandate has to be agreed by the Council of Ministers: probably by qualified majority. And it isn’t clear whether a final agreement would need to be ratified by all Member States as well as the EU itself.
2. If the EU does agree a mandate, that is likely to slam the door on any attempt by the UK to negotiate youth mobility agreements with individual Member States (because they have a duty of sincere cooperation). So any agreement would have to cover (say) 🇧🇬 as well as (say) 🇫🇷.
1. No plan to “stop the boats” (chase them into French waters, destroy them on (French?) shores) or to send refugees who do land here to other countries (safe, because otherwise UK public opinion, let alone law, won’t wear it) works without cooperation of those countries. Esp. 🇫🇷
2. Those countries won’t do deals or cooperate just because it suits the UK. And France is (and French voters are) well aware that France takes many more refugees than we do.