Clause 9
Tribunals, Courts and Enforcement Bill
1:00 pm
Vera Baird (Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Department for Constitutional Affairs; Redcar, Labour)
This is about the tribunal’s review powers and the right of onward appeal. The first tier tribunal can be reviewed or appealed against. Appeals are only to correct errors of law or to clarify the law, but essentially they are to correct accidental errors. The hon. Member for North-West Norfolk has put his finger on what the review panel is about. A review can be done either through the tribunal’s own initiative or on application by a person who has a right of appeal. As he said, the point is to ensure that only those cases that lead to appeal go there.
There are parallels. The hon. Gentleman referred to the civil procedure rules. Rule 40.12 provides for slips and omissions in civil courts to be corrected without the need for an appeal. Section 155 of the Criminal Courts (Sentencing) Act 2000 provides a slip rule for the criminal courts to vary or rescind a sentence within 28 days. There is a similar power in section 142 of the Magistrates’ Courts Act 1980. Those are the precedents that he sought from me.
Similar amendments were tabled in the House of Lords. We modified the review provisions to make sure that they were not too wide. They are now subject to tribunal procedure rules that can be used, for example, to stop frivolous applications for review for the sake of it—of the sort that the hon. Member for North Southwark and Bermondsey conjured up in his analogy of school appeals. I hope that I have satisfied him about reviews.
As for broadening the scope of appeal to the upper tribunals, the pattern is that the first tier is to hear appeals from the decision maker. It will consider all the evidence. It will make findings of fact and, where necessary, law. It would be completely disproportionate to set up another tribunal that could rerun that. However, if the first tier tribunal gets the law wrong or substantive issues of law need an authoritative ruling, the upper tribunal is there to deal with such matters. Without it, those rulings would have to go to the High Court or the Court of Session to be made. It is exactly the model that we are used to through the employment tribunals, the Employment Appeal Tribunal and the social security commissioners. It is straightforward and flexible.
The hon. Member for North Southwark and Bermondsey mentioned manifestly unreasonable conclusions on the facts and the importance of having a ground of appeal wide enough to stop those automatically from going out into the more expensive, more complex and longer procedure of judicial review. We feel confident that our error of law is wide enough to deal with manifestly unreasonable conclusions on the facts. I hope that both hon. Gentlemen will accept that we have struck a fair and proportionate balance and that the amendments can be withdrawn.