“(a) to direct that the decision, so far as it remains in force, is to cease to have effect from such time as the tribunal may direct; (b) to require the Commissioners to conduct, in accordance with the directions of the tribunal, a review or further review as appropriate of the original decision; and (c) in the case of a decision which has already been acted on or taken effect, and cannot be remedied by a review or further review as appropriate, to declare the decision to have been unreasonable and to give directions to the Commissioners as to the steps to be taken for securing that repetitions of the unreasonableness do not occur when comparable circumstances arise in the future.”
“1) The learned judge was wrong in law to hold that the Claimants would need to show ‘something more than a realistic chance of success … in any prospective judicial review’ in order to engage the power of the High Court [§47], later described by him as a ‘high threshold’ [§59] and ‘that elevated and exceptional category which could be described as fundamentally unlawful’ [§59]. 2) Further or alternatively, the Claimants do have a realistic chance of success on the grounds advanced in the application for judicial review, which do amount to fundamental unlawfulness of the kind required by the lower Court, in any event. 3) The learned judge failed to consider at all the Claimant’s challenge to the impugned decisions on the ground of improper purpose. 4) The learned judge was wrong as a matter of law and fact in his determination that there was not a real prospect of success in the Claimants’ challenge to the impugned decisions on the ground of procedural unfairness.”
“When considering applications for permission to apply for judicial review of decisions against which there is a statutory appeal on a particular ground or grounds, the Court should be astute to ensure that the grounds for judicial review are not, in reality, the statutory ground or grounds of appeal dressed up in some ostensibly different legal clothes in order to sidestep some unwelcome feature of the statutory appellate scheme, such as a time limit or the lack of a power to grant interim relief. Both the Proportionality ground (insofar as it does not overlap with the Improper Purpose ground) and the Wednesbury Unreasonableness ground are, in substance, the complaint that the decision was ‘unreasonable’ dressed up in different legal formulations. There is no real prospect of persuading the Court of Appeal that permission should have been given to apply for judicial review on those grounds.”
“As I understand it, the principle is that if two courts are faced substantially with the same question, it is desirable to ensure that that question is debated in only one of those two courts if by that means justice can be done.”
“It seems to me that to allow two sets of proceedings to go on about practically the same subject matter, in two different courts at one and the same time must prima facie be a course which the court should avoid. If he resumes the hearing while the High Court action is undecided the county court judge may well be deciding a matter which is purely of academic interest – in fact sitting to hear a moot and not a judicial case at all.”
“The correct principle seems to me to be this. If a ‘relevant decision’ is challenged only on the basis that it is one to which HMRC could not reasonably have come the case falls squarely within section 16 [FA 1994], and the Court should not intervene. However, where the challenge to the decision is not simply that it is unreasonable but that it is unlawful on some other ground, then the case falls outside the statutory regime and there is nothing objectionable in the Court entertaining a claim for judicial review or, where appropriate, granting interim relief in connection with that claim.”