Cumbria County Council loses Judicial review case - and costs

Cumbria County Council has lost the application for Judicial Review of the Local Government Reform decision which was launched by the council's Labour leader against the wishes of a majority of the council. 

This will not surprise anyone who saw the legal advice given to Cumbria County council and nor will the fact that the Judge ordered the county council to pay the legal costs of the government and the other councils in Cumbria - essentially the county council didn't have much of a case. 

The County Council has been ordered to pay the government £15,223 to cover government legal costs in this case and £7,500 to each of the six district councils in Cumbia, a total of £60,223. The county council's taxpayers will also, of course, have to fork out for the County's own legal bills.

The poor old taxpayer would have paid the bill whatever the court decided, of course but the costs award, and indeed the ruling itself, makes clear that the judge thought the  County Cabinet were acting unreasonably and to blame for the waste of public money.


 

Comments

Chris Whiteside said…
I have corrected a minor error in he original version of this post.

I had misread the amount of legal costs payable from CCC to the secretary of stage as 16k when it is actually 15k and consequently put down the total legal bill payable to other public bodies as £61k instead of £60k. I have now corrected this. Apologies for the mistake.
11:23 pm
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