Associated Provincial Picture Houses Ltd v Wednesbury Corporation
English legal case setting rule on "unreasonability" of administrative decisions
Associated Provincial Picture Houses Ltd. v Wednesbury Corporation [1948] 1 KB 223 is an English law case that sets out the standard of unreasonableness in the decision of a public body, which would make it liable to be quashed on judicial review, known as Wednesbury unreasonableness.
The court gave three conditions on which it would intervene to correct a bad administrative decision, including on grounds of its unreasonableness in the special sense later articulated in Council of Civil Service Unions v Minister for the Civil Service by Lord Diplock:
So outrageous in its defiance of logic or accepted moral standards that no sensible person who had applied his mind to the question to be decided could have arrived at it.
Facts
Under the Cinematograph Act 1909, cinemas could be open from Mondays to Saturdays but not on Sundays. The Sunday Entertainments Act 1932 legalised opening cinemas on Sundays by the local licensing authorities "subject to such conditions as the authority may think fit to impose" after a majority vote by the borough.
In 1947, the municipal corporation of Wednesbury in Staffordshire granted to Associated Provincial Picture Houses a licence to operate a cinema, on condition that no children under 15, whether accompanied by an adult or not, were admitted on Sundays. Associated Provincial Picture Houses sought a declaration from the Court that this condition in the licence was unacceptable and outside the power of the corporation to impose.
Judgment
The court decided that it had no power to issue a writ of certiorari to quash the decision of the defendant simply because the court disagreed with it. For the court to adopt any remedies against decisions of public bodies such as Wednesbury Corporation, it would have to find that the decision-maker:
had given undue relevance to facts that in reality lacked the relevance for being considered in the decision-making process.
had not given relevance to facts that were relevant and worthy of being considered in the decision-making process
had made a decision that was completely absurd, a decision so unreasonable that no reasonable authority could have possibly made it.
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