ABSTRACT
Judicial review of administrative/executive decision-making forms the core of the study of modern administrative law. Judicial review is a growth area. Much of the early research in this area was conducted by Maurice Sunkin at Essex University (see (1987) 50 MLR 432 and (1991) PL 490). From 544 applications for judicial review being commenced in 1981, the number had risen in 1995 to 3,604 (Le Sueur and Sunkin, Public Law, 1997, Longman) with the most common sources of complaint being local authority decisions on homelessness and Home Office decisions on immigration. As Bridges, Meszaros and Sunkin point out, however (Judicial Review in Perspective, 1995, Cavendish Publishing), the number of such applications ‘is tiny by contrast to the scale of administrative decision making’. Le Sueur and Sunkin themselves note that in 1994 there were 447 applications for review involving homelessness out of some 170,000 people whose applications were rejected and, in the absence of a right of appeal under the Housing Act 1985, these failed applications represented the potential pool for judicial review applications. (As noted in Chapter 1, a right of appeal is now provided under the Housing Act 1996.) Compared with the number of cases heard by tribunals (see Chapter 9) some of which actually determine hundreds of thousands of cases each year, the supervisory jurisdiction of the courts by way of judicial review would appear, purely in terms of numbers, to be relatively unimportant. However, it is suggested that the relative importance of the power of judicial review is not to be gauged simply by reference to numbers. Numbers are clearly of practical significance. However, in terms of the fundamental theory of balance of power within the constitution, the power of judicial review is central (see Chapter 1). Indeed, one of the established standard texts on administrative law (Cane, An Introduction to Administrative Law, 3rd edn, 1996, Oxford University Press) is almost entirely devoted to a study of judicial review (with a mere 12 pages on tribunals).
