Reshaping human rights legislation in order to give prime consideration to domestic law may generate doubt, a former Supreme Court justice has informed.It was recommended by an independent review into the Human Rights Act that section 2 of the 1998 legislation should be amended, making UK statute and case law the first concern to address when executing a convention right, prior to Strasbourg case law being considered. ‘By giving prior consideration to national law but continuing to take proper account of ECtHR [European Court of Human Rights] case law, it is designed to promote greater consistency in the application of section 2 by UK Courts and greater domestic political and public ownership of human rights, while giving full effect to the principle of subsidiarity and maintaining the beneficial equilibrium reached between UK Courts and the ECtHR,’ the Gross review reports.However, Lord Carnwath of Notting Hill, who resided on the Supreme Court bench for eight years, notified the House of Commons justice select committee this week that he opposed the proposal. ‘They seem to be saying it would improve our feeling that the thing belongs to us if there was some sort of provision that says “Start off by looking at British law/common law, and then only if that’s not adequate go on to the convention”’, he stated.‘If the convention is going to give you rights, and you bring yourself within those rights, you should be able to rely on them. I don’t see why you should be looking around for some other common law equivalent.’When questioned how the government’s proposals on section 2 could alter the UK courts’ approach to Strasbourg case law, Lord Carnwath commented: ‘I can’t predict, I’m afraid. Happily, I’m no longer there. If I was there, I would be very confused. We would go through a period where we would have hopeful advocates appearing in front of us, citing cases from all over the place. My own feeling is, one would eventually settle down and say, as these cases may go to Strasbourg, we’ve obviously got to keep in mind what they’re saying. I find it difficult to see how it’s meant to operate. I certainly think it’s not going to increase certainty, which is what the government seems to be saying.’Lord Carnwath also informed the committee that he found plans to minimise foreign national offenders’ right to appeal deportation orders on human rights grounds ‘somewhat confusing’, indicating that stringent limitations on the courts’ powers were initiated in 2014.

More than two years after it was initially announced, the anticipated royal commission on the criminal justice system still has no set start date.Lord Wolfson, the Justice minister, notified the House of Lords that the government still plans to host a commission, which was made public in the Queen’s speech in December 2019, but mentioned that due to coronavirus, it has been delayed.‘Due to the pandemic, we slowed work to establish the royal commission,’ he noted. ‘Significant new programmes of work were established to support recovery and build back a better system. In the last six months, we have undertaken several new programmes. All our focus is on delivering these priorities over the coming months.’Lord Ramsbotham, Crossbench peer a former chief inspector of prisons, who initially questioned timings in July 2020, stated: ‘I regard it as extremely discourteous of the government to ask Her Majesty the Queen to make an announcement which they had no intention of implementing.’In response, Wolfson said: ‘Since the Queen’s speech in 2019, there has been a small matter of a global pandemic, which has affected the criminal justice system very substantially.’ ‘It is a little unfair to say and, in fact, inaccurate to say that we had no intention of implementing that,’ he further noted.The former president of the family division, Baroness Butler-Sloss, simply asked: ‘When is it intended to start the royal commission?’Wolfson replied: ‘I’m afraid I can’t go any further than [what] I have already said. We are looking at it. What we want to do is make sure that we actually maintain our current programmes.’A former MP Conservative peer, Lord Forsyth, questioned how the pandemic or other work within the Ministry of Justice would have interrupted the establishment of the royal commission or its running.Wolfson commented: ‘As I understand it, the royal commission would need significant resource from the department and, indeed, the people who are working on the royal commission were deployed to other work during the pandemic and that is what they are still doing.’He additionally said: ‘We are still focused, in due course, [on] having a royal commission on criminal justice.’

Land Registry has revealed that in excess of 3,500 applications per day include missing, unfinished or incorrectly drawn information. A caseworker evaluates the matter and a request for information, known as a ‘requisition’, is often sent out. A requisition can hinder the completion of a straightforward case as applications can take up to two weeks to update.In a blog, customer policy executive Darren Standring stated that feedback showed customers ‘like a quick phone call’ how to fix a simple application issue. ‘We don’t currently have comprehensive information on how often they were used and how much time they saved for customers and for our caseworkers. The aim of the trial is to help us make evidence-driven decisions about the future of telephone requisitions,’ he noted.At present, older cases are being trialled in which a caseworker will call a conveyancer. If however the issue cannot be resolved over the phone, a requisition will be made in writing as before. Most requisitions are emailed to conveyancers.Telephone requisitions will be tested for no less than a month. ‘We will then take stock of what the trial has told us and make a decision on how to proceed. At this stage we are not necessarily committing to the reintroduction of telephone requisitions as we want to be sure that any long-term solution provides real support for our customers as well as bringing greater efficiency – and therefore speed – to our services,’ Standring noted.

The government has revealed in its ‘Levelling Up’ white paper that legislation will be set in motion if necessary to make sure more upfront information is available to prospective home buyers.Published late this week, the 332-page document states that approximately a third of all housing transactions fall through, resulting in people having to pay hundreds of millions of pounds, and pledges to improve the ‘expensive, time-consuming and stressful’ process of selling and buying a home.It notes: ‘The UK government and the industry will work together to ensure the critical material information buyers need to know – like tenure type, lease length and any service charges – are available digitally wherever possible from trusted and authenticated sources, and provided only once. If necessary, the UK government will legislate.’Practitioner groups and representative bodies have been looking at ways to offer more upfront information. Last year the Law Society started trialling a new transaction form, TA6 Part 1, to make additional information during listing. The Home Buying and Selling Group published a Buying and Selling Property Information (BASPI) dataset, which included details from the Law Society’s current TA6 form, property information questionnaire and valuation summary.The government also intends to see take-up of more commonhold flats to ‘level up’ the country by supporting more people onto the housing ladder, and also plans to bring forward commonhold legislation as part of a wider policy.The government has been eager to encourage commonhold as an appealing alternative form of property ownership and revealed a Commonhold Council last year to ready the market.

The defence body, NHS Resolution, has named the 11 firms which will be on its legal panel in order to manage cases over the next three years.The annual expenditure, minus of VAT, during this period could be approximately £193m, however NHSR emphasises that there is no guarantee of work or its value. The new contracts commence on 1 March.Support will be provided by the first panel to the organisation to handle claims under clinical and non-clinical indemnity schemes for NHS trusts, GP practices and independent sector providers. The firms included in this category are: Bevan Brittan, Browne Jacobson, Capsticks, Clyde & Co, DAC Beachcroft, DWF Law, Hempsons, Hill Dickinson, Kennedys and Weightmans.A second panel supplying expert advice on regulatory, health and employment law include: Bevan Brittan, Blake Morgan, Browne Jacobson, Capsticks, DAC Beachcroft, Hempsons, Hill Dickinson and Weightmans.NHS Resolution noted in a statement that: ‘Contracts were awarded following a rigorous, competitive procurement process to ensure firms are appointed that can provide a high quality service at a competitive price, ensuring maximum value for money.’The panel is made up of an extension of the firms selected in 2019, the final time the process ran. On that particular event, seven firms were allotted to facilitate with all seven employed in the new group.

Candidates logging into their SQE accounts to view their results were able to view other candidate’s data – however, the Solicitors Regulation Authority’s exam provider confirmed that no breach occurred.Under the new route to qualifying as a solicitor, nearly all of the 1,090 candidates who took the exam were given access to their results last Thursday. Kaplan, the exam provider, confirmed that the issues for eight candidates were settled last Friday.Following this, the Solicitors Regulation Authority announced that 53% of candidates passed SQE1, the first of the two sets of assessments under the new qualification route.Kaplan reported that candidates who took the exam are sent an email notifying them that their results are accessible in their account. A breakdown of their results are found on the results page, including their quintile position in connection to others in the exam.Asked if results were visible among candidates, Kaplan said: ‘We were made aware by a small number of candidates of inconsistencies in non-exam information displayed on the website, specifically relating to name and candidate ID number. We have investigated and do not believe candidates saw other candidates’ results.’Pressurised further on the matter, Kaplan noted: ‘Yes, several candidates saw a name and exam ID number of another candidate, but this was on pages outside of the secure log-in part of the platform, and therefore no other information was seen.’When questioned if any of the issues had been reported to the Information Commissioner’s Office, Kaplan responded: ‘We were made aware by a small number of candidates of inconsistencies in non-exam information displayed on the website. We have investigated to ensure that no sensitive information was released in error. We have determined there was no reportable data breach but the SRA has notified their relationship manager at the ICO as part of their standard process.’

The billions recovered by law enforcement through fines and confiscations should be utilised by the UK to create a ‘central economic crime fighting fund’ to support agencies which are ‘under- resourced, over-stretched, and out-gunned’, a recent report details.The National Crime Agency (NCA) has suggested that the UK loses approximately £290bn each year to fraud and money laundering, which when combined equals to almost 15% of the UK’s GDP.Nonetheless, anti-corruption charity Spotlight on Corruption has estimated that the average sum spent per year on law enforcement agencies was £852m, equivalent to just 0.09% of entire government spending or 0.042% of GDP.In a report published this week, Spotlight on Corruption stated that The Serious Fraud Office, HM Revenue and Customs, the Crown Prosecution Service and the NCA ,proposed around £3.9bn through fines, confiscation, forfeiture and civil recovery orders, between 2016 and 2021.For example, assets worth £568m were recovered by the CPS through its proceeds of crime unit over the past five years, which is ‘eleven times more than its £51.7m budget for the same period’.It is estimated by Spotlight of Corruption that if that £3.9bn total was reinvested back into the agencies, ‘overall enforcement spending could have been provisionally increased by an additional £748m per year – an approximate increase of 93% on current funding levels’.However, despite making a significant revenue, ‘law enforcement budgets at core agencies tasked with fighting economic crime continue to suffer from real-term cuts and short-term budget allocations rather than sustained investment’, it further added.The report detailed: ‘Existing government proposals for funding law enforcement are not sufficient to drive the transformational change needed to keep pace with what the government recognises as a severe and growing threat. If the UK is to tackle economic crime effectively, far greater ambition about the scale of public investment needed is required.’Spotlight on Corruption also requested ‘a coherent strategy for protecting the public purse in economic crime law enforcement actions’, which would include the progression of ‘an enforceable model litigant code for lawyers to prevent the use of stalling and spurious tactics that waste court time and drain public resources’, and collaborating with judges ‘to ensure better judicial management of cases to strike out abusive litigation tactics’.

HM Land Registry has informed conveyancers to ‘get ready’ for a fee rise, which will be the first to be implemented since 2009. The blog that published this information also has suggested that further changes could potentially lie ahead.Last November the agency reported that fees for registers and transfers of title would increase by up to 21% under new changes that will take place from 31 January.  In the recent blog, Iain Banfield, the chief financial officer, noted that applications which are submitted before 31 January, but were put forward on or after this date, will be contingent to the new fees, along with will applications placed before 31 January but later cancelled, refused or resubmitted on or after the 31st.Banfield stated: ‘The fee increase allows HM Land Registry to move forward with plans to deliver what customers need – more consistency and speed in service delivery – by investing in both operational capacity and accelerating the digitalisation and automation of services. With this in mind, we are exploring further changes to the fee order, including its structure and simplicity. We are currently engaging as widely as we can before we set out any proposals.’

Westernisation can provide a basis for a claim for leave to remain in the UK in cases where individuals face a pressing chance of persecution, if they are unable to comply with the standards of conservative societies, a tribunal has ordered.A ‘westernised’ family of five who escaped Iraq in 2006 have successfully won an appeal against the denial of leave on the terms that they would face ‘a real risk of persecution because they are atheists’.Gaenor Bruce, Upper Tribunal Judge, stated: ‘They do not wish to adhere to conservative Islamic norms because they fundamentally do not agree with them. They should not be expected to do so simply in order to remain safe.’Bruce highlighted that the Refugee Convention does not issue ‘a protected and unfettered right to enjoy one’s life in the way that one would like: there is no human right to listen to a particular kind of music, drink alcohol or to wear jeans’. Nonetheless, it can provide protection ‘where the modifications required of the claimants amount to suppressions of the inalienable rights afforded to them by international law’, she added.Westernisation can additionally allow an individual to protection in circumstances where they have been residing in the UK for a lengthy period of time, or if they are unacquainted with the mainstream culture in their country of origin, as there is a chance that their ‘modified behaviour will slip’.The tribunal were informed that the family, who were all ‘nominally’ Muslim, but have not been practising, formerly lived in an wealthy area of Baghdad, in which their atheism was ‘simply never an issue’.Bruce however commented, that ‘the Iraq of 2021 is very different from the Iraq that they left’ and alluded to expert evidence proposing that ‘today religion permeates the public space’ and that atheists ‘often keep their views secret’ for worry of harassment, attack or possibly murder.‘In that context an individual does not have to sell books, or shout on a street corner, to proclaim that he is not a Muslim: his lack of faith is apparent in his everyday actions,’ Bruce noted.‘[The father] will be regarded with curiosity if he permits his daughters to go out unchaperoned; that curiosity will rise to suspicion if he is never seen at mosque; suspicion would quickly escalate to hostility if the family fail to observe the fasts in Ramadhan or to don black during Muharram; that hostility could, at any time, give rise to persecution if, for instance, the women insist on remaining unveiled or the family’s attitudes lead to them being identified as particularly wealthy.’She further stated: ‘Although evidence about fashion, or entertainment preferences, appears at first glance to consist of little more than an appeal to pluralism, and thus lying entirely outwith the protection framework, that evidence must be carefully assessed.‘First, to determine whether the lifestyle choices of the claimant are in fact an expression of  beliefs prohibited or disapproved of in his country of origin. Second, whether there is a real risk of that claimant failing to effectively mask his “western” identity and thus exposing himself to harm.’The human rights claims of the parents and their youngest child were formerly permitted by consent, as the Home Office acknowledged it would not be appropriate to expect their young child to leave the UK, which led to the acceptance of their two other children’s human rights appeals.