Andrew Bano, a Social
Security and Child Support Commissioner, discusses bringing together tribunals
into the judicial family in an article which originally appeared in ‘Benchmark’
the judicial newsletter. This article has been reproduced with kind permission
of the author and Benchmark team.
The 2001 report of the review of tribunals chaired by
Sir Andrew Leggatt, Tribunals for Users-One System, One Service, painted a
bleak picture. It described a patchwork of tribunals administered by different
government departments, each of which had been created by individual pieces of
primary legislation, but without any overarching framework. To deal with this
problem, the Leggatt report recommended that tribunals should be brought
together into a single system, administered by a new Tribunals Service in what
was then the Lord Chancellor’s Department.
Like many similar reports, the recommendations of the
Leggatt inquiry might have gone unheeded, but for human rights concerns. The
departments which administered tribunals were usually the rule making authority
for their tribunals and paid the salaries and fees of the tribunal members.
Since those departments were usually parties to the proceedings before the
tribunal, it was evident that tribunals did not have the independence which was
required by Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights.
The First-tier Tribunal is part of the administrative justice system of the United Kingdom. It was created in 2008 as part of a programme, set out in the Tribunals, Courts and Enforcement Act 2007, to rationalise the tribunal system, and has since taken on the functions of twenty previously existing tribunals. It is administered by Her Majesty's Courts and Tribunals Service.
