New Clause 5
Tribunals, Courts and Enforcement Bill [Lords]
12:30 pm
Henry Bellingham (Shadow Minister, Constitutional Affairs; North West Norfolk, Conservative)
I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.
I am grateful to you, Mrs. Humble. This is the last time that I will trouble the Committee this morning and perhaps even today. The new clause would extend the scope of ombudsmen in various ways. I refer the Committee to a report published by Lord Justice Woolf in 1996. He recommended that the relationship between ombudsmen and the courts should be broadened, enabling issues to be referred by ombudsmen to the courts and by the courts to the ombudsmen, obviously with the consent of all those involved. That makes sense. The new clause would remove some of the impediments that are currently in place. Obviously, the impediments—the tight rules—were put in place to ensure that ombudsmen did not trespass on or usurp the jurisdiction of courts or tribunals. Over time, developing case law has narrowed the discretion of ombudsmen in a way that has been seen to present them with severe difficulties and has created some injustice for complainants. This is quite an arcane point, but it is important. We have plenty of constituents who come to our surgeries and advice centres and complain about various matters, either local or national, and want us to refer them to the ombudsman. When it comes to the parliamentary ombudsman, the MP has to endorse the complaint before it can be referred. Many of us have been put in the invidious position of deciding whether to sign up to a complaint. I think that most of us, to keep the peace, tend to go along with what the constituent wants on the basis that if that is what they feel needs doing, we should support them.
Very often, cases go to an ombudsman when a concurrent legal case is under way. Having looked at the way in which case law has developed—I do not want to go into a long discussion about it now—I think that we need to follow Lord Woolf’s suggestion and broaden the relationship between the ombudsmen and the courts. That means that the issues can be referred either way.
The new clause has the support of the head of the administrative court, Mr. Justice Collins, and the senior president of tribunals designate, Lord Justice Carnwath. That is quite an endorsement. In the spirit of good will, given that lunch is pending and the Minister is in a good mood—her officials look demob happy—perhaps she could give us something to take away by accepting the new clause.