Public law and public law bodies
Public Bodies must ensure that they conform to high standards of public administration and governance. For example, a public body must act reasonably and fairly in its decision-making processes or may have a duty to consult.
Our Administrative and Public Law Disputes Team advises both public bodies and commercial clients on alleged breaches of public law rights and duties.
Our main areas of advice include:
- Procurement disputes: both bringing or defending procurement challenges across many sectors. We advise on strategy and tactics behind the scenes or directly manage litigation for our clients pre action, in interim applications and through to Trial. We are currently advising on a £1/4 billion pound procurement challenge.
- Judicial Reviews: across all sectors including tax, planning and environmental disputes. We bring and defend Judicial Reviews and S288 and S289 challenges. Examples of Planning Judicial Reviews include commercial developments, heritage assets, retail, leisure and housebuilding. Commercial Judicial Reviews include cases in the security, transport, freight, waste and education sectors.
- Education disputes and student issues: advising institutions onfunding, disability/special educational needs, SEND Tribunals, mental health, and fitness to practise. We specialise in safeguarding advice and investigations – both current and historic. We also advise on OIA cases, appeals, contract and negligence claims and complaints, specialising in handling persistent and vexatious complainants.
- Local Authority disputes: we specialise in advising onpersistent and vexatious complaints and advising on issues with senior Executive and Councillors being adversely targeted.
- Equality Act and customer discrimination claims and general complaints handling.
- Care homes and health sector: advising on funding/fees and other disputes and regulatory issues in the healthcare sector including procurement disputes, safeguarding issues and cases involving the Care Quality Commission.
- Charity disputes: advising on both external and internal disputes including Board Disputes, SIRs and Charity Commission investigations.
- General public law and regulatory issues: including cemetery regulations, police and crime commissioner powers (PCC), use of public funding in national Infrastructure projects.
Our cases often involve Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and Subject Access Requests and we are experienced in these.
The court’s jurisdiction to review the conduct of public and quasi public bodies is often underestimated. We have considerable experience of exploiting the innovative and increasingly used remedy of judicial review. In common with many other public law remedies tight deadlines apply.
Richard specialises in property based public law disputes and Sara and the team advise on all other areas.
Sara and Richard are solicitor advocates and keenly appreciate the importance of preparing a case for presentation in court. However, we also appreciate the need to identify and secure pragmatic, commercial solutions, whenever possible.
Key contacts
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Partner, Head of Property Litigation
Their knowledge, and the availability of the individuals I work with, are key benefits to managing our casework.
Legal 500 [UK 2024]
