The Work and Pensions Committee is conducting an inquiry on a highly important matter: how vulnerable welfare claimants are safeguarded by the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP), and whether changes ought to be made. In the course of this work, it has raised this important question: should the DWP be placed under a statutory duty for safeguarding vulnerable claimants? In posing this question, the Committee is contemplating joining in with a trend in contemporary public law: the proliferation of the concept of ‘vulnerability’. Much of the research on this trend has thus far focused on human ..read more

It is hard to think of a concept with a more contested definition in legal and political circles than “the rule of law”. The question of what content (if any) might be found within it (and indeed, what “it” even is – a political truth? A normative ideal? A mere slogan?) has been taken up, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, by first-year law students, wizened academics, campaigning groups and politicians. If it sometimes seems that a thicker, rights-laden understanding of the term has taken root, detractors are always quick to emerge, eager to remind us of what the rule of law is and what ..read more

Government has a legitimate interest in seeking to prevent and reduce error in the benefits system and in taking action to recover funds lost. And there is widespread pressure for the Department for Work and Pensions to do just that. However, creating systems capable of doing this work is fraught with challenges, including in terms of maintaining fairness and legality. Chief amongst them is the complexity of undertaking error detection work at the scale necessary for effectiveness without harming benefit recipients, who are often vulnerable and for whom benefits are an essential source of fina ..read more

*Editors’ note: This post is part of a series on ‘The Human Rights Act After 22 Years’, following the SLS Annual Seminar held in November 2022. You can read the first post in the series here. Rising like an arguably rather dark phoenix from the ashes, the Bill of Rights Bill now appears back on the legislative agenda. Yet again, the repeal of the Human Rights Act 1998 (HRA) seems somewhat inevitable, unless cabinet will once again implode in turmoil. In this light, the potential of the common law to provide a system of rights protection of similar vigour to that of the HRA ..read more

Judgment was given in the famous Wednesbury case 75 years ago today, on 10th November 1947. Readers of this blog know full well the facts of the case, the judgment of Lord Greene (reported [1948] 1 KB 223), the mythical status of ‘Wednesbury unreasonableness’ and critiques thereof, such as Lord (previously Sir Robin) Cooke’s dislike of what he saw as Lord Greene’s circumlocution, a ‘retrogressive’ decision and the unnecessary use of ‘the geographical epithet’ of Wednesbury.   Contrary to that view, however, there is more to consider on this anniversary about the p ..read more

This piece considers two recent decisions – one by the Court of Appeal (“CA”): D4 v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2022] EWCA Civ 33, and the other by the Supreme Court (“SC”): R (The Project for the Registration of Children as British Citizens) v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2022] UKSC 3 (“PRCBC”). At a general level, the cases raised similar issues: both involved challenges to delegation legislation on grounds that they were ultra vires; both related to citizenship – D4 about its deprivation, PRCBC about its conferral. This piece seeks to draw some threads from t ..read more

The Novak Djokovic saga, which eventually resulted in the world number one male tennis player’s deportation from Australia, became a matter of possible electoral significance in Australia and led to protests on the streets of Belgrade. After successfully challenging the Australian Border Force’s original decision to cancel his visa (Djokovic v Minister for Home Affairs), the Australian immigration minister chose to exercise a discretionary power to cancel Djokovic’s visa. Djokovic was unsuccessful in challenging this decision (Djokovic v Minister for Immigration, Citizenship, Migrant Services ..read more

No, this is not a paper on covid rule-breaking by UK ministers.  Instead it analyses the judgment of 20th December 2021 in Re Napier, on what happens when Northern Ireland ministers refuse to comply with their legal duties.  The particular duty was the duty to participate in meetings of the North-South Ministerial Council (the NSMC).    Given that the Democratic Unionist Party ministers had already been found to be acting unlawfully by failing to participate, what would happen when the case came back before the court, and the court was asked to order them to stop acti ..read more

This is the second in a series of two posts on the remedial reforms proposed in the Judicial Review and Courts Bill (2021), which provide for courts in judicial review proceedings to grant suspended and prospective-only quashing orders. The first post considered the general case for reform, arguing reform is justified so as to reassert a remedial approach characterised by flexibility and which calibrates remedial responses based on reasoned consideration of relevant factors. Part 1 also explained that while neither prospective-only nor suspended relief are unknown to the common law, the refor ..read more

There are many claims made about decision-making in judicial review. The way that judges do decide, or ought to decide, cases is the subject of lively debate within the political, policy, practitioner, and academic spheres. For instance, in recent years there have been prominent warnings of the ‘conceptual growth or overgrowth’ of judicial review and of judicial review making ‘significant inroads into executive discretion.’ Such claims, and the debates which they provoke and influence, have consequences. They can shape how courts approach cases, how litigants litigate, and how the government ..read more