page_title: Administrative law in Singapore
section_title: Irrationality or Wednesbury unreasonableness
hierarchical_section_title: Administrative law in Singapore / Irrationality or Wednesbury unreasonableness
caption_attribution_description: English: HDB flats at Tampines New Town.
context_page_description: Administrative law in Singapore is a branch of public law that is concerned with the control of governmental powers as exercised through its various administrative agencies. Administrative law requires administrators – ministers, civil servants and public authorities – to act fairly, reasonably and in accordance with the law. Singapore administrative law is largely based on English administrative law, which the nation inherited at independence in 1965.
  Claims for judicial review of administrative action may generally be brought under three well-established broad headings: illegality, irrationality, and procedural impropriety.
  Illegality is divided into two categories: those that, if proved, mean that the public authority was not empowered to take action or make the decision it did; and those that relate to whether the authority exercised its discretion properly.
context_section_description: In the GCHQ case, irrationality, the second broad head of judicial review, was equated with Wednesbury unreasonableness, named after the UK case Associated Provincial Picture Houses v. Wednesbury Corporation (1947). Lord Diplock said:
  By "irrationality" I mean what can by now be succinctly referred to as "Wednesbury unreasonableness" ... . It applies to a decision which is so outrageous in its defiance of logic or of accepted moral standards that no sensible person who had applied his mind to the question to be decided could have arrived at it.
  The justification for the strict standard of this ground of judicial review is the doctrine of separation of powers. In R. v. Secretary of State for the Home Department, ex parte Brind (1991), Lord Ackner explained that where the court was not acting in pursuance of a statutory right of appeal but exercising its supervisory jurisdiction, it would be usurping the decision-maker's power if it substituted its own decision on the merits for that of the decision-maker. It could quash a decision by a government minister "[i]f no reasonable minister properly directing himself would have reached the impugned decision", but for an aggrieved person "[t]o seek the court's intervention on the basis that the correct or objectively reasonable decision is other than the decision which the minister has made is to invite the court to adjudicate as if Parliament had provided a right of appeal against the decision – that is, to invite an abuse of power by the judiciary".
  The decision of a Singapore public authority was found to be Wednesbury unreasonable in Mir Hassan bin Abdul Rahman v Attorney-General (2009). The case concerned a decision of the Strata Titles Board (STB) not to reschedule a hearing date for the approval of a condominium's sale and purchase agreement. The applicants, who were representatives of a sales committee representing the owners of units in a condominium, had agreed to sell the condominium to certain purchasers. Under the agreement between the parties, the applicants were required to obtain the STB's approval for the transaction by 25 July 2008. However, the STB only scheduled a hearing on 7 August 2008. Unable to obtain the purchaser's approval to extend the deadline, the applicants applied for the hearing date to be brought forward, but the application was dismissed by the registrar of the STB. Upon an application for judicial review of this decision, the High Court held that "the STB's decision to schedule the resumed hearing on 7 August 2008, which is beyond its mandate and is an exercise in futility, was, in the circumstances of this case, unreasonable in the Wednesbury sense".
  Wednesbury unreasonableness appears to be applied in the UK on a sliding scale with varying levels of scrutiny depending on the nature of the case. An applicant must prove a higher level of unreasonableness for matters involving political judgment such as national security and financial administration, than for matters in which the individual's liberty is at stake. The differing levels of intensity of review are set out in the table below:
  In the Singapore context, there appears to be some implicit suggestion that the light touch test applies to certain cases. In Re Wong Sin Yee (2007), the applicant had been detained without trial under the Criminal Law (Temporary Provisions) Act for involvement in criminal activities on the ground that the detention was in the interests of public safety, peace and good order. The High Court concluded that the judicial process was unsuitable for reaching decisions made on such grounds, and that therefore it was "in no position to hold that it has been established that the Minister's exercise of discretion was irrational in the Wednesbury sense". On the other hand, the anxious scrutiny standard has not been applied thus far in Singapore.
caption: Public housing in Tampines. A privatized Housing and Urban Development Corporation (HUDC) condominium called Tampines Court elsewhere in this estate was the subject of a 2009 case. The High Court held that the Strata Titles Board had acted irrationally by scheduling a hearing date after the contractual deadline by which the Board's approval of the sale and purchase of the condominium had to be obtained.
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