A & Ors v Leicester Crown Court & Anor

A Crown Court has no inherent power to remit a young defendant to the Youth Court. Such a power requires statutory authority. The distinction between a procedural failure and an absence of jurisdiction is decisive: the parliamentary-intention test applies to failures in procedural steps, not to create jurisdiction where the court had no power to embark on the case. A Youth Court lacks constituted jurisdiction where its authority does not depend on factual findings and it simply has no statutory power to try the defendants. Judicial review remains discretionary, but relief should ordinarily be granted where proceedings remain current and refusal would leave an unresolved jurisdictional objection in a statutory appeal. Completed proceedings may justify refusing relief.

Three defendants under 18 were jointly committed to the Crown Court with an adult co-defendant under section 24(1)(b) of the Magistrates' Courts Act 1980. After the adult pleaded guilty, the Crown Court purported to remit the young defendants to the Youth Court, where they were convicted and sentenced.

Following R (on the application of W A Minor) v Leeds Crown Court [2011] EWHC 2326 (Admin), it was accepted that the Crown Court had no power to remit. The issue was whether the remission and convictions should be quashed, or whether relief should be refused because the error was procedural, the Youth Court had adjudicative jurisdiction, or the defendants had received a fair trial.

1. Disposition. The application for judicial review was granted. The Crown Court remission order and the Youth Court convictions were quashed. It was declared that the Youth Court had no power to try the claimants.
2. The statutory scheme establishes that young defendants should ordinarily be dealt with in the Youth Court. Section 29(2) of the Magistrates' Courts Act 1980 gives an adult Magistrates' Court a power to remit a young defendant, but there is no equivalent Crown Court power. The Crown Court cannot invent such a power by implication.
3. The principle in R v Soneji [2005] UKHL 49 concerns the consequences of failing to take a procedural step or satisfy a procedural condition. It does not permit a court to treat jurisdiction as existing when the court has no power to embark on the proceedings. This case concerned absence of jurisdiction in the narrow sense, not a procedural defect in the route by which the defendants arrived before the Youth Court.
4. The distinction between constituted and adjudicative jurisdiction may assist analysis. Adjudicative jurisdiction depends on facts that the tribunal must determine; constituted jurisdiction is absent where the tribunal has no power to begin the decision-making process. The present case fell into the latter category.
5. The remission order and convictions were not nullities that could simply be ignored. They remained legally effective unless quashed. Nevertheless, refusal of relief would leave the claimants’ statutory appeals under section 108 of the Magistrates' Courts Act 1980 without a coherent answer to the jurisdictional objection. The proceedings were still current because sentence had not finally concluded the matter. Although completed cases would normally justify refusal of relief, that consideration did not apply here.

The judgment does not state a prior appellate decision in this litigation. It records the earlier Administrative Court decision in R (on the application of W A Minor) v Leeds Crown Court [2011] EWHC 2326 (Admin) as an authority on the absence of a Crown Court power to remit.