Case: Associated Provincial Picture Houses Limited v Wednesbury Corporation [1947] EWCA Civ 1 ; [1948] 1 KB 223
Outcome: applied
The Amended Notice of Appeal claimed that seven questions of law were raised in the appeal. The errors of law underlying these questions are said to be that the Tribunal: (a) applied the wrong test of 'serious hardship'; (b) made errors in dealing with the materials and evidence before it in that: (i) it made findings for which there was no evidence; (ii) it failed to take relevant considerations into account and took irrelevant considerations into account; (iii) its conclusions were affected by Wednesbury unreasonableness; and (iv) it wrongly applied the test of 'serious hardship' by finding that the respondent would suffer 'serious hardship' within the meaning of s 340- 5 (3) if he was not released from part of his tax debt, when that finding was not open to it on the evidence; (c) it failed to exercise its discretion as to relief given in s 340- 5 (3) of the Act. 51 The alleged errors set out in (b)(iii) and (iv) in paragraph [12] of these reasons essentially raise the same issues and can be dealt with together. The applicant says that a finding of serious hardship was not open to the Tribunal on the evidence before it and that the decision was totally unreasonable in the sense referred to by Lord Greene MR in Associated Provincial Picture Houses Limited v Wednesbury Corporation [1947] EWCA Civ 1 ; [1948] 1 KB 223 at 229-230. The principle on which the applicant relies was elaborated by Mason J in Minister for Aboriginal Affairs v Peko-Wallsend Limited [1986] HCA 40 ; (1986) 162 CLR 24 at 41-42 where his Honour said: 'It follows that, in the absence of any statutory indication of the weight to be given to various considerations, it is generally for the decision-maker and not the court to determine the appropriate weight to be given to the matters which are required to be taken into account in exercising the statutory power ... I say "generally" because both principle and authority indicate that in some circumstances a court may set aside an administrative decision which has failed to give adequate weight to a relevant factor of great importance, or has given excessive weight to a relevant factor of no great importance. The preferred ground on which this is done, however, is not the failure to take into account relevant considerations or the taking into account of irrelevant considerations, but that the decision is "manifestly unreasonable". ... However, in its application, there has been considerable diversity in the readiness with which courts have found the test to be satisfied. ... But guidance may be found in the close analogy between judicial review of administrative action and appellate review of a judicial discretion. In the context of the latter, it has been held that an appellate court may review a discretionary judgment that has failed to give proper weight to a particular matter, but it will be slow to do so because a mere preference for a different result will not suffice. ... So too in the context of administrative law, a court should proceed with caution when reviewing an administrative decision on the ground that it does not give proper weight to relevant factors, lest it exceed its supervisory role by reviewing the decision on the merits.' 57 The Tribunal's decision to grant relief to a taxpayer who is in receipt of what, by community standards, is a very substantial income is initially surprising. However, the decision was based on a consideration of the evidence and the respondent's particular circumstances. As the Tribunal saw it, that income was highly vulnerable should the respondent be made bankrupt and, given the complications arising from the wife's illness, it was very likely that serious hardship would follow. On balance, I find that the Tribunal's conclusion was open to it and that the applicant has failed to establish the high standards of unreasonableness required for a decision to be reviewable on the Wednesbury ground. Whilst other minds might reasonably have disagreed with the Tribunal's inferences of fact and ultimate conclusion, the Tribunal's decision was not so unreasonable that no reasonable decision-maker could ever have come to it; see Zizza v Federal Commissioner of Taxation (1999) 42 ATR 371 at [15].