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10 January 2014 / Nicholas Dobson
Issue: 7589 / Categories: Features , Local government , Public
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Hurry up please, it’s time!

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Bring judicial review claims promptly, warns Nicholas Dobson

Not too long ago, pub licensees well understood the importance of time. For, as TS Eliot noted in The Waste Land, once the clock had struck the witching hour of 10:30pm, the landlord would bellow (with the delicacy of a souped-up foghorn): “Hurry up please, it’s time!”

This is a precept which claimants and their litigators would also do well to “read, mark and inwardly digest”. For, on 2 August 2013, the Court of Appeal (upholding the Administrative Court below) decided that a challenge brought to a major outsourcing project, initiated by London Borough of Barnet, must fail as out of time (see R (Nash) v Barnet London Borough council [2013] EWCA Civ 1004).

The council’s proposals were described by the claimant as representing “a radical experiment in local government”, which would make Barnet “almost unrecognisable as a traditional council”. And Underhill LJ below, had acknowledged that the council’s proposals were “on any view outsourcing on a very large scale”.

But

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