“The election petition was issued at the high court yesterday 15 05 2025. The Bundle has been sent today to the Stephen Young Returning officer, Sarah Pochin MP, Mark Roberts Head of Cheshire Police, Emma Gilthorpe Head of Royal Mail and the DPP by recorded next day delivery.”
“On or around20 May 2025 , I became aware that a bundle of documents had been sent to my parliamentary address at the House of Commons, London, SW1A 0AA and were provided to me by the security at the House of Commons. I understand these documents were an election petition.”
“(3) The petition shall be in the prescribed form, state the prescribed matters and be signed by the petitioner, or all the petitioners if more than one, and shall be presented to the High Court, or to the Court of Session, or to the High Court of Northern Ireland, depending on whether the constituency to which it relates is in England and Wales, or Scotland or Northern Ireland. (4) The petition shall be presented by delivering it to the prescribed officer or otherwise dealing with it in the prescribed manner; and the prescribed officer shall send a copy of it to the returning officer of the constituency to which the petition relates, who shall forthwith publish it in that constituency. (5) The petition shall be served in such manner as may be prescribed.”
“Subject to the provisions of this section, a parliamentary election petition shall be presented within 21 days after the return has been made to the Clerk of the Crown, or to the Clerk of the Crown for Northern Ireland, as the case may be, of the member to whose election the petition relates.”
“Subject to the provisions of this section, a petition questioning an election under the local government Act shall be presented within 21 days after the day on which the election was held.”
“These Rules replace in modern form (with a few minor and consequential changes in procedure) the Rules relating to parliamentary and local government election petitions. Some of the existing provisions have been omitted in reliance on the general practice and procedure of the High Court, which will apply notwithstanding any different practice followed by committees of the House of Commons in dealing with election petitions before 1868.”
“Subject to the provisions of the Act and these Rules, the practice and procedure of the High Court shall apply to a petition under these Rules as if it were an ordinary claim within its jurisdiction, notwithstanding any different practice, principle or rule on which the committees of the House of Commons used to act in dealing with election petitions.”
“(1) Within five days after giving the security the petitioner shall serve on the respondent within the meaning of section 121(2) or section 128(2) of the Act and on the Director of Public Prosecutions a notice of the presentation of the petition and of the nature and amount of the security which he has given, together with a copy of the petition and of the affidavit accompanying any recognisance. (2) Service shall be effected in the manner in which a claim form is served and a certificate of service shall be filed as soon as practicable after service has been effected.”
“Any period of time prescribed by Rules 5, 6 or 7 shall be computed in accordance with section 119 of the Act and shall not be varied by order or otherwise, but save as aforesaid rules 2.8 to 2.11 and 3.1(2)(a) of theCivil Procedure Rules 1998 shall apply to any period of time prescribed by these Rules as if it were prescribed by the Civil Procedure Rules.”
“In a contested election, when the result of the poll has been ascertained, the returning officer shall forthwith— (a) declare to be elected the candidate to whom the majority of votes has been given; (b) return his name to the Clerk of the Crown; and (c) give public notice of his name and of the total number of votes given for each candidate together with the number of rejected ballot papers under each head shown in the statement of rejected ballot papers.”
“(1) The Clerk of the Crown shall from the certificate on each writ returned to him enter the name of the member returned in a book to be kept by him at the Crown Office. … (3) The book shall be open to public inspection at reasonable times and any person may, on payment of a reasonable fee, take copies from the book.”
“The returning officer shall destroy each candidate’s home address form— (a) on the next working day following the 21st day after the officer has returned the name of the member elected; or (b) if an election petition questioning the election or return is presented before that day, on the next working day following the conclusion of proceedings on the petition or on appeal from such proceedings.”
“The suggested distinction between service out of time and service of defective documents is in my judgment illusory in a case like this. There was here ‘a complete failure to give the notice within the prescribed time’ since the notice served was simply not the notice required. I accept that it might be otherwise in other cases. Suppose, for example, the figure for security were misstated or certain particulars were omitted or a petition was served with only its alternate pages copied. The examples were multiplied in argument. I readily accept that not every typographical and other such error will necessarily constitute non-compliance with the legislative requirements. Precisely which errors are remediable and which fatal it is unnecessary to decide. It is sufficient for present purposes to hold that the document served must at least address each of the two specified requirements, the petition and the security, before there can properly be said to have been timeous compliance with this legislation.”
“does this legislation on its true construction give the court a discretion to waive these petitioners’ timeous non-compliance or must it be regarded as fatal to their proceedings?”
“Timeous service is an imperative in these cases. Rule 19 is very strong.CPR r 2.11 , for example, ordinarily allows for parties to agree variations of specified time limits. Rule 19 disapplies it in rule 6 cases.”
“Flexibility and discretion are all very well but there is merit too in certainty, not least in the field of electoral challenge. It is undesirable to have someone serving in a public office with doubts surrounding the legitimacy of his election.”
“54. In particular, all the cases to which Simon Brown LJ has referred, including the Shrewsbury case 19 LT 499, are cases in which no notice was given within the prescribed period. None of them is a case in which a defective notice was given timeously. I would leave open for future decision whether the court has a discretion, through section 157(3) of the 1983 Act andCPR r 3.10 , to treat a defect in a timeous notice as a failure to comply with a relevant rule. Alternatively, a court might treat a notice which substantially complied with the provisions of section 136(3) as sufficient compliance with it. As Simon Brown LJ puts it, precisely which errors are remediable and which fatal it is unnecessary to decide. 55. I would, however, add this. Although I would leave these questions for future consideration in the light of such rules as then apply, even if the court had a discretion in such a case, I would expect it to be exercised in a petitioner’s favour only in a very rare case, because I can see no reason in principle why petitioners and their solicitors should not read the relevant provisions of the 1983 Act and the 1960 Rules, which are quite simple, and apply them in accordance with their terms. 56. Finally, while I would accept [the] submission that there is a hierarchy of provisions, first Part III of the 1983 Act and the 1960 Rules, next the CPR and finally any residual practice, principle or rule of the House of Commons, that does not resolve the question whether the court has the powers given by the CPR in the absence of a provision of the 1960 Rules which is in less absolute terms than rule 19(1), which expressly forbids an enlargement of time. I would leave that further question open until it arises.”
“In our view, the correct construction of rule 4 of the [1960] Rules is that it is not necessary for the petition separately to state the date of the return if there is a sufficient statement of the date on which the returning officer had an obligation to make the return. The wording of rule 4 is that the petition ‘shall state … the date and result of the election …, showing in the case of a parliamentary election the date on which the return was made…’ (emphasis added). If, as here, the petition states the date on which the election was conducted and date on which the result was declared, then there is a sufficient ‘showing’ of the date on which the return was made, because the returning officer had an obligation to make the return ‘forthwith’. To require that there should be a separate specification of the date of the return – which, other than as a deduction from the date of the declaration of the result, may well not be within the knowledge of a petitioner – serves simply to add a technical requirement, which might well not be understood by petitioners (many of whom … may be unrepresented), to no real purpose.”
“It is not difficult to think of many examples of where a strict application of rule 4, such as contended for by [Mr Young], might mean that otherwise meritorious petitions were found invalid and demurrable for technical errors or oversights. Thus, it might be the case that the petition got the date of the election slightly wrong; or contained a statement of some evidence by which the facts relied on were to be proved; or set out the relief claimed at the beginning rather than at the conclusion of the document; or, while saying what was being sought in the body of the petition, contained nothing which would ordinarily be described as a ‘prayer’. All of these are the types of matters which it would reasonably be expected should be capable of being remedied or disregarded in an appropriate case, and where, if it had actually been intended by Parliament that that should not be the case, that would have needed to be stated expressly.”
“But what the courts have to decide in a particular case is the legal consequence of non-compliance on the rights of the subject viewed in the light of a concrete state of facts and a continuing chain of events. It may be that what the courts are faced with is not so much a stark choice of alternatives but a spectrum of possibilities in which one compartment or description fades gradually into another. At one end of this spectrum there may be cases in which a fundamental obligation may have been so outrageously and flagrantly ignored or defied that the subject may safely ignore what has been done and treat it as having no legal consequences upon himself. In such a case if the defaulting authority seeks to rely on its action it may be that the subject is entitled to use the defect in procedure simply as a shield or defence without having taken any positive action of his own. At the other end of the spectrum the defect in procedure may be so nugatory or trivial that the authority can safely proceed without remedial action, confident that, if the subject is so misguided as to rely on the fault, the courts will decline to listen to his complaint. But in a very great number of cases, it may be in a majority of them, it may be necessary for a subject, in order to safeguard himself, to go to the court for declaration of his rights, the grant of which may well be discretionary, and by the like token it may be wise for an authority … to do everything in its power to remedy the fault in its procedure so as not to deprive the subject of his due or themselves of their power to act. In such cases, though language like ‘mandatory,’ ‘directory,’ ‘void,’ ‘voidable,’ ‘nullity’ and so forth may be helpful in argument, it may be misleading in effect if relied on to show that the courts, in deciding the consequences of a defect in the exercise of power, are necessarily bound to fit the facts of a particular case and a developing chain of events into rigid legal categories or to stretch or cramp them on a bed of Procrustes invented by lawyers for the purposes of convenient exposition.”
“The statutory regime may reflect, and balance, a number of intersecting purposes, both as to substantive outcomes and as to the procedural protections inherent in the regime. In that situation, a more nuanced analysis may be called for. Soneji itself is an example of this. The purpose of depriving convicted offenders of the proceeds of their crimes had to be balanced against sufficient compliance with procedural protections available to them before they could be deprived of their property. A test of substantial compliance with a procedural rule may be an appropriate way to allow for such a balance to be struck between competing purposes. If there has been substantial compliance with the rule, so that the purpose served by it has largely (if not completely) been fulfilled, it may more readily be concluded that fulfilment of the competing substantive purpose of the legislation should be given priority.”
“91. In our view, in evaluating whether a procedural failure under the regime has the effect of invalidating the process, the question to be addressed is whether a relevant party has been deprived of a significant opportunity to have their opposition to the making of an order to transfer the right to manage considered, having regard to (a) what objections they could have raised and would have wished to raise and (b) whether, despite the procedural omission, they in fact had the opportunity to have their objections considered in the course of the process leading to the making of the order to transfer the right to manage. If there was no substantive objection which they could have raised or would have wished to raise, they have lost nothing of significance so far as the regime is concerned and the inference is that Parliament intended that the transfer of the right to manage should be effective notwithstanding the omission. If their objection has in fact been considered in the process, even though the claim notice was not served at the proper time, again they have lost nothing of significance so far as the regime is concerned and the inference as to Parliament's intention is the same. 92. In both cases, the focus is on the position of the party directly affected by the procedural omission. The omission does not give other persons who are not so affected … a right to object to the making of a transfer order if the party who is so affected has not sought to complain about this ….”
“(1) Where it appears to the court that there is a good reason to authorise service by a method or at a place not otherwise permitted by this Part, the court may make an order permitting service by an alternative method or at an alternative place. (2) On an application under this rule, the court may order that steps already taken to bring the claim form to the attention of the defendant by an alternative method or at an alternative place is good service.”
“In summary, we regard the following matters of particular significance: (1) that Mr Moore acted promptly, both in presenting the petition, and in taking the steps he did to bring it to Ms Pochin’s attention; (2) the manner in which the petition was brought to Ms Pochin’s attention was such as to create a clear point at which Ms Pochin could be said to have been served; (3) the contents of the petition were brought to her actual attention during the five day period; and (4) we can see no relevant prejudice which the third and fourth respondents will suffer by reason of the retrospective validation of the service which occurred. Those matters appear to us to constitute ‘a good reason’ why there should be a validation order underCPR r. 6.15 (2). To the extent that the context of rules 6 and 19 of the Rules requires that the ‘good reason’ has an additional degree of cogency and force, as is suggested in Ireland v Dorries, we consider that it has.”
“Rule 19 is very strong.CPR r 2.11 , for example, ordinarily allows for parties to agree variations of specified time limits. Rule 19 disapplies it in rule 6 cases.”
“As the editors of Civil Procedure, 2013 ed note (vol 1, para 6.15.5), rule 6.15(2) was designed to remedy what were thought to be defects as matters stood before1 October 2008 . The Court of Appeal had held in Elmes v Hygrade Food Products plc [2001] CP Rep 71 that the court had no jurisdiction to order retrospectively that an erroneous method of service already adopted should be allowed to stand as service by an alternative method permitted by the court. The editors of Civil Procedure, 2013 ed add that the particular significance of rule 6.15(2) is that it may enable a claimant to escape the serious consequences that would normally ensue where there has been mis-service and, not only has the period for service of the claim form fixed byCPR r 7.5 run, but also the relevant limitation period has expired”