The government needs to review its case against judicial review, says Jon Robins
“The ‘144’ figure touted by the Lord Chancellor is not just misleading, it’s meaningless.”
On Radio 4’s Today programme at the end of last month the Lord Chancellor, Chris Grayling, offered the following killer statistic by way of illustration of the true horror of the judicial review “problem”. “In 2011, there were 11,359 applications for judicial review,” he told listeners. “In the end, 144 were successful and all of the rest of them tied up government lawyers, local authority lawyers in time, in expense for a huge number of cases of which virtually none were successful.”
Damning statistics?
So, on our Lord Chancellor’s analysis, less than 1.5% of judicial reviews (JRs) were successful which, surely, suggests that something has gone very wrong with this most crucial legal mechanism for holding government and its agencies to account. “We’re not saying there shouldn’t be JR,” Grayling told John Humphrys. “We’re not saying that members of the public and organisations should not be able to challenge public bodies; but what we’re saying
