Examining Wednesbury's Unreasonableness In Public Decision Making

In all areas of law reasonableness tends to play a fundamental role including reasonably foreseeability, the reasonable man, beyond reasonable doubt and reasonable force to name a few. The concept of reasonableness in public decision making is no different and has developed, expanded and retracted in various jurisdictions over the past century. In public decision making, reasonableness particularly relates to judicial review, and the actions, events or otherwise which lead a public body to arrive at a particular decision rather the decision itself. It is of great importance that reasonableness is applied to public bodies in order to control the exercise of power and to prevent arbitrary and unfair decisions. In this essay, we will examine

This became known as Wednesbury unreasonableness. It was also held that the court will not intervene simply because it disagrees with a decision made by a public body, it must keep it mind that the body has the discretion, in many cases, and a court must not substitute itself for the authority in question. The test in Wednesbury led to an increasingly larger volume of people with grievances against public bodies. Lord Diplock, in the GCHQ case , put an end to this by narrowing the Wednesbury test. He redefined Wednesbury reasonableness to ‘Wednesbury irrationality’ and stated;

‘it applies to a decision so outrageous in its defiance of logic or of accepted moral standards that no sensible person who had applied his mind to the question to be decided could have arrived at it.’

Irish approach to

Here a compensation tribunal was set up to compensate the families of victims who had died in the Stardust tragedy. The grieving father of one victim sought a review of a decision made by the tribunal to award the mother of a victim compensation and the father no compensation. The court refused to quash the decision of the tribunal and, strangely, agreed that there were circumstances which justified awarding of compensation to one parent and not the other. This decision was made by a court which was quite critical of the approach taken by Lord Diplock in GCHQ. Henchy J. said he would be ‘slow to test reasonableness by seeing if it accords with logic’ and would be ‘equally slow’ to accept the moral standard criteria believing it a vague and inconsistent principle to base reasonableness on. Henchy J. stated the test of reasonableness as ‘whether the impugned decision plainly and unambiguously flies in the face of fundamental reason and common sense . Despite Henchy J. being critical of GCHQ, his test has been applied strictly in Ireland on policy grounds . In Stroker , a garda was dismissed following a sworn inquiry for bringing An Gardaí Síochana into disrepute. The applicant claimed his dismissal was unreasonable in relation to the alleged offenses. The court held that the decision of the commissioner to dismiss did not fly in the face of