Martin Partington: Spotlight on the Justice System

The Queen’s Speech sets out each year the bare bones of the proposed legislative programme for the forthcoming 12 months.

I’ve been looking through the detailed briefing to see whether there are issues which will affect the English Legal System (ELS) that may not be apparent from the speech itself.

Here are my personal comments:

Enterprise Bill.

The headline aim of the new Bill is to reduce red tape and improve the ways in which regulators work. But there are also two specific ELS related issues that may be noted:

• Establishing a Small Business Conciliation Service that will handle business-to-business disputes without the need for court action, tackling  in particular, late payment issues;
• Introducing business rates appeals reform, including modifying the Valuation Tribunal powers to consider ratepayer appeals.

Immigration Bill

Among proposed measures to be set out here, there are proposals to change the way in which immigration appeals work. In particular, the Government plans to:

Extend the principle of “deport first, appeal later” from just criminal cases, to all immigration cases. In 2014 the

last government cut the number of appeal rights but other than foreign criminals, migrants retain an in-country

right of appeal against the refusal of a human rights claim. We will now extend the “deport first, appeal later” principle to all cases, except where it will cause serious harm.