19.11.12
Judicial review process to be made more difficult
The right to legally challenge government policy is to be limited, Prime Minister David Cameron will announce today.
Speaking to the CBI in London at its annual conference, Cameron will call for measures to curtail “time-wasting” appeals to concentrate on improving the economy instead.
There will be less time to apply for a judicial review, with higher fees for the process and the chances of being granted an appeal halved. In 2011 there were over 11,000 applications for a judicial review, compared to 160 in 1975. Around one in six is granted an appeal.
Cameron is expected to say: “We urgently need to get a grip on this”.
By cutting bureaucracy, the Government could avoid time wasting appeals and “instead of giving hopeless cases up to four bites of the cherry to appeal a decision, we will halve that to two.”
He will add: “When this country was at war in the 1940s, Whitehall underwent a revolution. Normal rules were circumvented. Convention was thrown out. As one historian put it, everything was thrown at ‘the overriding purpose’ of beating Hitler.
“Well, this country is in the economic equivalent of war today – and we need the same spirit. We need to forget about crossing every 't' and dotting every 'i' - and we need to throw everything we’ve got at winning in this global race.”
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