"... a comprehensive but accessible handbook which can be used 'on the spot' in hearings and whenever information has to be located quickly" Judicial Review, 2011
"This format will undoubtedly be of assistance to busy practitioners and tribunal judges as they seek quickly to locate a particular rule on a particular point in a particular tribunal" Judicial Review, 2011
- The New Tribunals Handbook is the first comprehensive procedural guide to the Tribunals under the Tribunals, Courts and Enforcement Act 2007.
- The Handbook will be the most up-to-date guide to the Tribunals system and will include the latest procedural and jurisdictional changes, including the expansion of the General Regulatory Chamber and Immigration and Asylum Chamber.
Covering the new Tribunals, Courts and Enforcement Act 2007, this brand new title, aimed at practitioners and the Tribunals themselvesm, is both a reference tool and an on-the-spot, in-court source of procedural rules and guidance for advocates, judges and other Tribunal members and users.
The Handbook is arranged in an encyclopaedic fashion with entries covering the rules and procedure specific to each of the Chambers of the First-Tier Tribunal and Upper Tribunal and entries that apply across the Tribunals system, including those covering the rules relating to costs, decisions, hearings, rights to appeal and judicial review.
Reviews:
- In his report, Tribunals for Users: One System, One Service: Report of the Review of Tribunals, Sir Andrew Leggatt identified two major concerns within tribunals: a lack of independence and a lack of coherence. One strand of both, which he hoped could and would be addressed by reforming the tribunals system, was that each tribunal had different rules, often originating from draftsmen in the original sponsoring government department. He recommended that “so far as possible tribunals should all be regulated by the same rules of procedure”; and that these should be short, simple and based upon the model tribunal rules which had been produced by the Council on Tribunals.
- This was not the fist time that concern had been expressed about the number and nature of procedural rules. In his report on the civil justice system, three years earlier, Lord Woolf produced a core set of civil justice rules which he hoped would replace the Rules of the Supreme Court and County Court Rules. They comprised 39 rules, covering about 200 pages. His hope- that, in a reformed civil justice system, the size of the rules and the propositions in them could be substantially reduced- proved optimistic. Volume 1 of the White Book is currently over 3,000 pages long, and the law reports are replete with cases interpreting the civil rules. To make procedural rules that are short and simple is challenging.
- Following the implementation of the Leggatt Report in the Tribunals, Courts and Enforcement Act 2007, a Tribunal Procedure Committee was set up to make the procedural rules for the jurisdiction within the reformed tribunal system. It is obliged by the Act to make rules that are simple, and simply expressed. I have already expressed the view that the Committee is “one of the great success stories of the reform programme”. Compared with many of the procedural rules with which we have to grapple, the Committee has, true to its statutory obligation, provided us with rules that are straight forward, short and in a format generally consistent between jurisdictions.
- Of course, the rules for each chamber are not identical. Tribunals range from those that consider challenges to the assessment of disability benefit in which “cheapness, accessibility and freedom from technicality are desirable and achievable objectives”, to tax and lands cases where legal and factual issues are found as complex as in the High Court and where “a degree of procedural formality is unavoidable if justice is to be done… There may be little in reality to distinguish such a ‘tribunal’ case from a case before a specialist ‘court’ such as the Technology and Construction Court”. As a result, although they have common format, principles and characteristics, there are significant differences between the sets of chamber rules.
