Tom Hickman and Maurice Sunkin: Success in Judicial Review: The Current Position

Avid readers of the legal press may have spotted the eye-catching statistic that in 2014 a meagre 1% of claims for judicial review were successful.

The figure is derived from the statement in the MOJ’s overview of the Civil Justice Statistics Quarterly (October – December 2014) published on 5 March 2015, in which the MOJ said:

“The proportion of all cases lodged found in favour of the claimant at a final hearing has reduced … to 1% in 2013 and has remained the same in 2014.”

The overview provided by the MOJ is unsurprisingly hardly a neutral presentation of the statistics. The statement is clearly intended to tell a story about the futility of the vast majority of judicial review claims, adding fuel to the MOJ-stoked fire that has been raging against judicial review.

In fact the statistic tells the opposite story, as revealed by the underlying tables.

The…