Associated Provincial Picture Houses v Wednesbury

Facts

The company ran a cinema in Wednesbury. The Sunday Entertainments Act 1932 allowed local authorities to license cinemas to open on Sundays subject to such conditions as the authority thought fit to impose. Wednesbury Corporation granted a licence on the condition that no children under fifteen be admitted on Sundays, whether accompanied by adults or not. The company argued that the condition was unreasonable and outside the authority's powers.

History

The company's claim for a declaration that the condition was ultra vires failed at first instance, and it appealed to the Court of Appeal.

Issue

Whether a condition attached by a local authority under a broad statutory discretion could be set aside by a court on the ground that it was unreasonable, and if so by what standard.

Held

Appeal dismissed. The condition was within the authority's powers and was not unreasonable in the relevant sense.

Ratio

• When a statute gives a public authority a discretion, the court may intervene only if the authority has misdirected itself in law, taken into account irrelevant considerations, failed to take into account relevant considerations, or reached a decision so unreasonable that no reasonable authority could ever have come to it.
• The court is not an appeal body and may not substitute its own view of what is reasonable for that of the authority to which Parliament entrusted the decision.

The judgments

Key reasoning

• Where Parliament confers a broad discretion on a local authority, the court's role is limited to ensuring that the authority has acted within the law and has not abused the power.
• The various heads of unreasonableness overlap, and a decision may be impugned either because the authority erred in what it considered or because the outcome is so extreme that no sensible authority could have reached it.
• The condition concerned the welfare of children and the character of Sunday entertainment, matters on which the authority could properly take a view, and there was no ground for saying its view was absurd.

Where it fits in the module

The FHS unreasonableness topic is built on the tension between Wednesbury deference and heightened scrutiny. Wednesbury set a very high threshold, later restated as irrationality in Council of Civil Service Unions v Minister for the Civil Service [1985] AC 374. Courts have since varied the intensity of review, as in R v Ministry of Defence, ex p Smith [1996] QB 517, where rights-based decisions were subjected to anxious scrutiny, and the relation with proportionality was considered in Kennedy v Charity Commission [2014] UKSC 20 and Pham v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2015] UKSC 19. In R (Keyu) v Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs [2015] UKSC 69 some Justices questioned whether the test should be reconsidered. The topic asks whether a single standard of reasonableness is defensible or whether the courts should adopt a structured proportionality test.

Criticisms

• The threshold is so high that it protects almost every decision, and the formula is circular, because a decision is unreasonable if no reasonable authority could make it.
• The label unreasonableness conflates distinct grounds, such as irrelevant considerations and absurd outcomes, so it obscures the reasoning courts actually apply.
• The deferential test is poorly suited to cases engaging fundamental rights, which is why the courts have developed variable intensity and proportionality to supplement it.
• The test offers little transparency about how much weight the court gives to the merits of the decision, so outcomes are hard to predict.