The House was asked whether natural justice required that there be an oral hearing of a determination by a tax tribunal of whether there was a prima facie case.
Held: A refusal to examine evidence submitted to a tribunal initially when there was an opportunity for the same party later to examine the same was lawful.
The requirement of fairness should not degenerate into hard and fast rules and any additional steps to the statutory procedure must not frustrate the apparent purpose of the legislation. Lord Guest said that the principles ‘should be reasonably clear and definite’ and cases should not be ‘decided ex post facto on some uncertain basis.’
Lord Reid said: ‘Natural justice requires that the procedure before any tribunal which is acting judicially shall be fair in all the circumstances, and I would be sorry to see this fundamental general principle degenerate into a series of hard-and-fast rules. For a long time the courts have, without objection from Parliament, supplemented procedure laid down in legislation where they have found that to be necessary for this purpose. But before this unusual kind of power is exercised it must be clear that the statutory procedure is insufficient to achieve justice and that to require additional steps would not frustrate the apparent purpose of the legislation.’
Judges:
Lord Reid, Lord Guest, Lord Morris
Citations:
[1971] AC 297, [1971] 3 All ER 275
Jurisdiction:
England and Wales
Cited by:
Cited – Secretary of State for the Home Department v SP CA 21-Dec-2004
The applcant, a girl aged 17 was in a young offender institution. She complained that she had been removed to segregation without first giving her chance to be heard. The respondent argued that there were sufficient post decision safeguards to . .
Cited – Bank Mellat v Her Majesty’s Treasury (No 2) SC 19-Jun-2013
The bank challenged measures taken by HM Treasury to restrict access to the United Kingdom’s financial markets by a major Iranian commercial bank, Bank Mellat, on the account of its alleged connection with Iran’s nuclear weapons and ballistic . .
Lists of cited by and citing cases may be incomplete.
Administrative, Natural Justice
Updated: 07 September 2022; Ref: scu.223052
