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The Supreme Court has, today, posted a list of decisions concerning permission to appeal on its website. This shows that 88 applications were dealt with between 1 October 2009 and 4 February 2010. Permission was granted in 24 cases and refused in 61, with one being struck out and 2 withdrawn. This is a “success rate” of just over 28%.
We are pleased that the Court has finally been able to provide this list. We would, however, make two comments. First, the list is a “PDF” document which will, presumably, be updated from time to time (the current version was created on 9 February and updated on 11 February). This is no substitute for an on line update service – with new decisions being added when they are made. This is, of course, what the House of Lords Judicial Committee gave us on a daily basis.
Second, although the Court has not said so, this appears to be a temporary measure, pending resolution of the Court’s continuing IT problems. We are grateful to Mr Benjamin Pell for drawing our attention to the following comment yesterday on the consistently informative Nearly Legal housing law blog by leading housing lawyer Jan Luba QC
“On behalf of the HLPA, I raised the issue of the availability of information about permission to appeal applications at the first meeting of the Supreme Court Users Group (22 January 2010). The staff made it clear that it had always been intended that the UKSC website would carry information about the making of, and progress of, permission applications. That material had only been delayed from making its appearance on the website by internal IT problems which were being adddressed. It was hoped that the position would be improved shortly”.
We assume that the IT problems cannot have been so bad that they prevented the Supreme Court from posting a PDF but rather the problem concerns the Court’s case management system. We had understood that, in due course, that system would “link” with the website to show the status of each case before the Supreme Court (also providing details of when documents are lodged and copies of those documents). We await news as to when this is expected.
