“[A]The degree to which the application will benefit the public good. [B]Whether the application is mainly for capital expenditure, within the threshold levels indicted. [C]The extent of partnership contributions to the project. [D]The long-term viability of the project and the ability of the applicant to secure the long-term running costs of the project.”
“I regret to advise you that after careful consideration the Commission did not choose to provide a grant for the Asha Centre project. In the light of the competition, the Commissioners decided that your application was less attractive than others before them. Your application for Round 5 funding has therefore been rejected. .... I know that the Commissioners' decision will come as a disappointment to you. Should you wish to discuss this letter please contact me at the Millennium Commission.”
“Applications received are subject to a detailed appraisal before the Commission makes a decision.”
“When the Commission's detailed examination of your 2nd stage application is completed, we will decide whether to make you an offer of grant. If your application is rejected, the Commission will write to you explaining why. Once grant has been offered to projects, a further grant contract will be negotiated. No payment will be against the full project until a grant is signed and any necessary conditions contained therein are fulfilled.”
“It may very well be that Lightman J was right, but the nature or quality of reasons to be given by the Commission for a negative decision is not without importance and the appellants' case cannot be said to be fanciful or unarguable.”
“academic judgments were not in the class of case where the nature and impact of the decision itself required that reasons be given as a routine aspect of procedural fairness but were in a class where some factor would be required to show that in the circumstances of the particular decision, fairness required reasons to be given; that where the decision which was sought to be impugned was on the evidence no more than an informed exercise of academic judgment, fairness alone would not require reasons to be given; that despite the importance of the decision to the applicant, the combination of openness in the run up to the decision with the prescriptively oracular character of the decision itself made the council's allocation of grades inapt for the giving of reasons; and that there was nothing inexplicable about the decision itself, which could not have occurred within a lawfully conducted evaluation, so as to oblige the council to furnish reasons.”
“It follows nonetheless from Lord Mustill's reasoning that the 'more familiar route' exemplified by Ex parte Cunningham [1992] 1 CR 816 may be broader than the Cunningham situation alone and capable of embracing other situations in which 'it is important that there should be an effective means of detecting the kind of error which would entitle the court to intervene.' This being so, it seems both desirable and practical to test by a common standard both the fairness of not telling a person the reasons for a decision affecting him and the desirability of exposing any grounds of legal challenge. There are, moreover, reasons of principle for a unitary test. As the judgments in Ex parte Cunningham show, one aspect of unfairness may be precisely the inability to know whether an error of law or of process has occurred. But since the latter is not a freestanding ground for requiring reasons (for if it were, it would apply universally), it can only be on grounds of fairness that it will arise; so that the need to know whether there has been an error of law or of process is rightly seen not as an alternative to the demands of fairness but as an aspect of them. This approach places on an even footing the multiple grounds on which the giving of reasons may in any one case be requisite. The giving of reasons may among other things concentrate the decision-maker's mind on the right questions; demonstrate to the recipient that this is so; show that the issues have been conscientiously addressed and how the result has been reached; or alternatively alert the recipient to a justiciable flaw in the process. On the other side of the argument, it may place an undue burden on decision-makers; demand an appearance of unanimity where there is diversity; call for the articulation of sometimes inexpressible value judgments; and offer an invitation to the captious to comb the reasons for previously unsuspected grounds of challenge. It is the relationship of these and other material considerations to the nature of the particular decision which will determine whether or not fairness demands reasons.”
“We reject the application, although it is eligible, on a particular ground.”
“Here fairness may require reasons so that the recipient may know whether the aberration is in the legal sense real (and so challengeable) or apparent; (b) it follows that this class [the Higher Education Funding Council] does not include decisions which are themselves challengeable by reference only to the reasons for them. A pure exercise of academic judgment is such a decision.”