Licensing and Permits in UK Law

It is limited to offences arising under enactments which prohibit the doing an act save in specified circumstances or by persons of specified classes or with specified qualifications or with the licence or permission of specified authorites Whenever the prosecution seeks to rely on this exception, the Court must construe the enactment under which the charge is laid.

My Lords, if there is one principle which forms an integral part of the English law, it is that every member of a body engaged in a judicial proceeding must be able to act judicially; and it has been held over and over again that, if a member of such a body is subject to a bias (whether financial or other) in favour of or against either party to the dispute or is in such a position that a bias must be assumed, he ought not to take part in the decision or even to sit upon the tribunal.

In most instances where a discretionary power is conferred it would be wrong for the decision maker to frame a rule in absolute terms because to do so would defeat the statutory purpose. However, it seems to me that there are certain exceptional statutory contexts where a policy may lawfully exclude exceptions to the rule because to allow exceptions would substantially undermine an important legislative aim which underpins the grant of discretionary power to the authority.

Furthermore, to treat such licences as "possessions" would, in my view, risk introducing unjustified distinctions into what is already a fairly complex area of law. If licensable activities enjoyed higher protection, the result in Countryside Alliance (that the expectation of future earnings was not a possession) could have been different if hunting had first been a licensable activity and the effect of the ban in the Hunting Act 2004 had been to make such licences worthless.

It may often be very difficult to address effective representations without knowing the points which are troubling the decision-maker. The prisoner should have the benefit of a procedure which fairly reflects, on the facts of his particular case, the importance of what is at stake for him, as for society.

This is an area of social control in which the Strasbourg court has always accorded a wide margin of appreciation to member States, which in terms of the domestic constitution translates into the broad power of judgment entrusted to local authorities by the legislature. If the local authority exercises that power rationally and in accordance with the purposes of the statute, it would require very unusual facts for it to amount to a disproportionate restriction on Convention rights.