I take this opportunity to welcome my new colleague, my hon. Friend the Member for North Shropshire (Helen Morgan), to these Benches. I congratulate her on the excellent speech she made today.
I rise to speak to the Liberal Democrat amendments 1 to 5. The Government claim that the Bill will ensure that judicial review is available to protect the rights of individuals against an overbearing state, but it will have quite the opposite effect. As Amnesty International and others have pointed out, the Bill will tie the hands of the judiciary in respect of what remedies they can order when public authorities act unlawfully. It will weaken the courts’ ability to ensure that justice is done and that human rights violations are remedied.
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Judicial review is a powerful tool for people to enforce their rights and is often used by the most vulnerable when no other form of legal redress is available. Clause 1 introduces prospective-only remedies in judicial review, which could be hugely harmful for those seeking justice and is opposed by the Law Society, JUSTICE, the Public Law Project and Liberty. It would not only deny redress to someone who has been harmed by unlawful action by a public body, but actively serve as a disincentive to those seeking justice through judicial review.
Let us imagine a person who has been incorrectly deemed ineligible for welfare benefits who has successfully challenged that decision through judicial review. A prospective-only remedy would mean that they would not receive the back payments that were unlawfully denied to them. They would not receive justice, which should never be the outcome of our judicial system.
Prospective-only remedies would also have a damaging effect on good governance. As Liberty rightly says:
“Being able to challenge those in power when they get things wrong is at the heart of our democracy.”
If public bodies are spared the risk of retrospective legal consequences, the motivation for good decision making is lower. I urge hon. Members to support amendments 1 to 4, which would remove that damaging aspect of the Bill.
Clause 2 is particularly concerning, because it would permit the courts to abolish Cart judicial reviews, as we have already heard this afternoon, which removes a vital safeguard in situations where tribunals make mistakes. The vast majority—92%—of Cart judicial reviews are immigration and asylum cases, and many of the remaining cases concern access to benefits for disabled people and those facing destitution. In all those situations, the stakes are incredibly high for the people involved.
Cart judicial reviews are not about having a third bite at the cherry, as many Conservative Members have claimed—far from it. They are granted only in situations where the claimant was never given a proper first bite, when a serious error of law was committed in the first tier tribunal and not corrected by the upper tribunal. There can be no justification for abolishing them and amendment 5 removes the provision from the Bill completely. I urge hon. Members to back it.
I will quickly touch on the clauses that introduce the automatic online conviction and standard statutory penalty. Liberal Democrats support the aim of reducing backlogs but, as JUSTICE argues, there are better ways of deploying technology in the criminal justice system. We therefore need an independent review of the likely impacts of the AOCSSP before it is introduced. Elements of the Bill are hugely concerning. I hope that through these amendments, we can remove its most damaging provisions.
I warned on Second Reading that the Bill is, by the Government’s own admission, the thin end of the wedge that opens the door to more restrictions on judicial review in future. New clauses 8 and 9 in the name of the right hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes) show what the thick end of the wedge would look like. We oppose those new clauses, which would make the Government’s bad Bill even worse.
This is just another Bill in the Government’s programme of constitutional reform that weakens the institutions and rights that hold the powerful to account. The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill attempts to restrict the right to peaceful protest and the Elections Bill disenfranchises thousands of people from marginalised backgrounds in the name of preventing voter fraud, when there is no evidence of that happening on a large scale. That is not to mention the Government’s contempt for the Human Rights Act. Nobody, not even Governments, is above the law. The Liberal Democrats will continue to stand against any attempt to weaken the institutions and rights that hold the powerful to account.