AC-2024-LON-001145 - [2025] EWHC 2075 (Admin)

Mr Ojo submitted that I should not treat Grounds 1-5 as res judicata or as an abuse of process because the Administrative Court had given no substantive consideration to the issues before it. By reference to a small clip of documents handed up at the hearing, Mr Ojo told me that the appellants had withdrawn the judicial review application because of delay by the Administrative Court in listing the renewal hearing. The Court had received the notice of renewal on 17 October 2023. He himself had sent the notice to the GMC on 24 October 2023. The Administrative Court Office processed the notice on 1 November 2023. The MPTS had determined the facts of the case on 7 November 2023 and the Court Office had sent out directions for the renewal hearing on 27 November 2023.

Mr Ojo asserted that, by the time that the Court sent out its directions, the renewal application had been rendered academic – and would have been regarded as academic by any judge hearing the renewed application – because proceedings in the MPTS had by then recommenced after the period of the adjournment. He submitted that any hearing of the renewal application would have taken further time during which the MPTS proceedings would have been too far advanced to enable any meaningful claim for judicial review to be made. The appellants had in effect been forced to withdraw their claim at an early stage before any final or substantive consideration of the issues that it raised.

Mr Ojo submitted that a refusal of permission to apply for judicial review on the papers had not provided the Administrative Court with an opportunity to hear the arguments in a fully ventilated form. The underlying purpose of the principles of res judicata was to achieve finality in litigation. The point of finality had not been reached in the second set of judicial review proceedings as the procedure in the Administrative Court had become static before the completion of the full procedure for judicial review had been allowed to take its course.

Mr Ojo submitted that even if principles of res judicata applied, the wider interests of justice (as mentioned by Sir John Donaldson in Momin Ali at paragraph 78 above) required that Grounds 1-5 be determined. The appellants were entitled to exercise their statutory appeal rights after a false start in the judicial review proceedings. Statutory appeal rights were a suitable forum for the ventilation of the issues.