AC-2025-LON-003228 - [2025] EWHC 2569 (Admin)

To complete the legal picture, before I turn to the claim, there is this. There was a time when the High Court had a jurisdiction where it would consider for itself – afresh – the bail merits after bail had been refused or withheld in the Crown Court. As all the cases in this area record, that course was abolished by Parliament in 2004, by virtue of s.17 of the Criminal Justice Act 2003. But that abolition of the merits jurisdiction left the supervisory judicial review jurisdiction intact. This is explained in W at §22. That case and the earlier cases describe the judicial review Court’s supervisory jurisdiction. So, for example, R (Iqbal) v Canterbury Crown Court [2020] EWHC 452 (Admin) addresses reasonableness review. And R (Rojas) v Snaresbrook Crown Court [2011] EWHC 3569 (Admin) addresses procedural unfairness. An example of a case where previous grants of bail turned into withdrawn bail, which was successfully challenged is R (Fergus) v Southampton Crown Court [2008] EWHC 3273 (Admin) (discussed in Rojas at §27). In Fergus at §§20-21 the Court described considerations relevant to reasonableness and also to legally adequate reasons.