Associated Provincial Picture Houses Ltd. v Wednesbury Corporation

Facts

A local authority, empowered to license Sunday cinema performances subject to such conditions as it thought fit, granted a licence on condition that no children under 15 be admitted on Sundays, whether or not accompanied by an adult. The cinema owners challenged the condition as unreasonable and beyond the authority's power. They sought a declaration that the condition was ultra vires.

Issues

• What is the scope of judicial review over the exercise of a statutory discretion?
• When can a court hold that a discretionary administrative decision is 'unreasonable' and strike it down?

Arguments

The owners argued the no-children condition was unreasonable and ultra vires the licensing power. The Corporation argued the statute gave it the discretion to impose such conditions as it thought fit and the court could not substitute its own view of reasonableness for that of the authority.

Held

The Court of Appeal dismissed the challenge and upheld the condition. Lord Greene MR held that a person entrusted with discretion must direct himself properly in law, take into account relevant considerations and exclude irrelevant ones; if he does, the court cannot interfere merely because it would have decided differently. The court can intervene only if the decision is one so absurd or unreasonable that no sensible authority, properly applying its mind, could ever have come to it. The legislation did not set up the court as an arbiter of the correctness of one view over another.

Ratio decidendi

An exercise of administrative discretion is open to judicial review for 'unreasonableness' only where the authority has considered irrelevant matters, ignored relevant ones, or reached a decision so unreasonable that no reasonable body could have arrived at it; the court does not sit in appeal on the merits.

Significance

The locus classicus of judicial review; 'Wednesbury unreasonableness' became a settled ground of review in England and India. It was later restated as 'irrationality' in the CCSU case (1985) and remains applicable in India where no fundamental rights are involved, though proportionality is now favoured in fundamental-rights cases (Om Kumar; Coimbatore).

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