The High Court has just handed down the judgment in the case of R (ex parte Kohler) v The Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime [2018] EWHC 1881.
It covers very important issues that will affect everyone who organises public consultations, and next week we will publish a considered Institute view of the implications.
In the meantime, note that this is a case where a local resident, Professor Paul Kohler challenged a decision taken to close the police station at Wimbledon. The process had included proposals to close 37 police counters across London in an exercise the Institute had called “possibly the worst consultation of 2017” (July 2017). The Court agreed with us.
In Paragraph 10 of the judgment, Lord Justice Lindblom and Mr Justice Lewis state:-
“The structure of the consultation document is incoherent and unhelpful…”
In Paragraph 17, having considered other failures, they describe them as “… symptomatic of the unsatisfactory way in which the decision-making process was conducted …”
In their overall assessment of the consultation, they say that
“The consultation process in this case was not conducted well. Both the content and the structure of the consultation document were unsatisfactory. It was markedly less helpful than such documents should be if they are to achieve their purpose in informing a decision on a matter of great significance for a large number of people ….”
“The summary of the consultation responses was not adequate …”
In the Kohler case, the decision was based upon inadequate consideration of consultee responses specific to Wimbledon, and no doubt the Mayor of London will take comfort from the Court’s decision not to interfere with all the other closures he proposed.
A key factor was that the Deputy Mayor, Sophie Linden appears not to have studied an important submission from local Liberal Democrats (adding a ‘Politics of consultation’ angle to an already complicated case), and this will cause anxiety for many decision-makers in central and local government, as well as in the NHS and other public bodies. As we study the details of this case, we believe it will be possible for the Institute to formulate advice and guidance that should prevent other consultors from being vulnerable to similar challenges.
