Associated Provincial Picture Houses Ltd v Wednesbury Corporation

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. The court ruled that the corporation's conduct was not inappropriate and complied with the standards that had been set out. As Lord Greene MR said (at 229), ==Significance==

The test laid down in this case, in all three limbs, is known as "the Wednesbury test". The term "Wednesbury unreasonableness" is used to describe the third limb, of being so unreasonable that no reasonable authority could have decided that way. This case or the principle laid down is cited in United Kingdom courts as a reason for courts to be hesitant to interfere with decisions of administrative law bodies. In recent times, particularly as a result of the enactment of the Human Rights Act 1998, the judiciary has receded from this strict abstentionist approach, arguing that in certain circumstances it is necessary to undertake a more searching review of administrative decisions. The European Court of Human Rights requires the reviewing court to subject the original decision to "anxious scrutiny" as to whether an administrative measure infringes a Convention right. In order to justify such an intrusion, the Respondents have to show that they pursued a "pressing social need" and that the means employed to achieve this were proportionate to the limitation of the right. The UK courts have also ruled that an opinion formed by an employer or other contracting body in relation to a contractual matter has to be "reasonable" in the sense in which that expression is used in Associated Provincial Picture Houses Ltd v Wednesbury Corporation: see the decision of the High Court in The Vainqueur José and that of the Supreme Court in Braganza v BP Shipping Limited. ==See also==