England and Wales Court of Appeal (Civil Division) Decisions

IN THE SUPREME COURT OF JUDICATURE
COURT OF APPEAL (CIVIL DIVISION)
ON APPEAL FROM QUEEN'S BENCH DIVISION
(ADMINISTRATIVE COURT)
(MR JUSTICE SCOTT BAKER)

		Royal Courts of Justice Strand London WC2 Tuesday, 26th March 2002

Tuesday, 26th March 2001

1. SIR DENIS HENRY: This matter arises in this way. Back a long time ago now Mrs Lewy was seeking redress for medical negligence. In the course of this she fell out with a firm of solicitors, as a result of which she went to the authorities making complaints of criminal conduct, as she saw it, against those solicitors. She went to the Crown Prosecution Service; she went to the Legal Services Ombudsman; she went to the Solicitors' Disciplinary Tribunal. All three bodies in the event disappointed her in that they took no action against the solicitors concerned. In those circumstances she went to the law to seek proceedings for judicial review seeking to quash their decisions in relation to the matter of complaint that she had made to them.
2. Her application was for permission to bring judicial review proceedings. Permission is compulsory for judicial review proceedings to be heard. She applied to Collins J asking for permission. That permission was refused, as was her application. From there she appealed, as she was entitled to do, to a two-man Divisional Court, constituting Kennedy LJ and Butterfield J. They, as well, refused her application for judicial review, and, in the course of it, Kennedy LJ, having set out the history of the matter, concluded:

"The fact is that in my judgment there is no possible reason for Mrs Lewy to complain about the conduct of Vanderpumps and Sykes and therefore no possible reason for her to obtain redress from any of the bodies to whom I have referred in the course of this short judgment. It follows that in my judgment there can be no basis for granting her the relief which she seeks from us, that is to say permission to move for judicial review of any of the decisions which have been taken. I am sorry to say that I see no particular point in trying to explain further what has been said in one letter after another to her by a variety of other people. I, for my part, would dismissed the renewed applications."

3. That is what happened.
4. A further appeal to the Court of Appeal lay from that. The application was heard by Pill LJ and we have his judgment dealing with the facts of this matter; but, I know Mrs Lewy would want me to say, dealing with the facts in a way which did not commend itself to her. Having considered this application, Pill LJ refused her permission on 14th November. He had power to do so and that matter should have brought these proceedings to an end. However, since then there have been various other applications, which I need not concern myself with in this judgment.
5. What Mrs Lewy wishes is for this case to go on to the House of Lords. The difficulty with that is that it would not assist her because the House of Lords has no jurisdiction to entertain appeals relating to matters of refusal of permission; nor are any other applications to the Court of Appeal open to her because the Court of Appeal is now functus after Pill LJ's decision on this matter.
6. The law is accurately set out in the notes to Civil Procedure Volume 1, Autumn 2001, at page 1061 under the heading "Appeals to the House of Lords":

"In Re Poh [1983] 1 WLR 2, the House of Lords held that there can be no appeal to the House of Lords against a decision of the Court of Appeal refusing permission to apply for judicial review. The reasoning in Re Poh had been doubted by the Privy Council in Kemper Reinsurance Co v Minister of Finance [1998] 3 WLR 630. The House of Lords has, however, upheld the decision in Re Poh and confirmed that the House of Lords has no jurisdiction to entertain an appeal against the refusal of permission to apply for judicial review: R v Secretary of State for Trade and Industry ex p Eastaway [2000] 1 WLR 2222. The House of Lords reasoned that the Court of Appeal only had jurisdiction to entertain an appeal against a decision of the High Court refusing permission to apply for judicial review. If the Court of Appeal refused permission to appeal, then such a decision was covered by the rule in Lane v Esdaile [[1891] AC 210] and there could not be an appeal against that refusal of permission to appeal."

7. I have looked at those authorities and I am satisfied that that summary of what is set out in them is accurate. The decision in Eastaway is binding on this court and obviously binding on me.
8. In those circumstances neither the Court of Appeal nor the House of Lords has any further jurisdiction in this matter and the application for permission must, for that reason, be refused. It is simply a question of jurisdiction. There is no jurisdiction either in this court or in the House of Lords.
(Application refused; no order as to costs).