Biased Judges, Biased Judgements

Statute vs Case Law

British law is founded on two principal legal sources: statute law and case law (also known as common law). These sources interact but have distinct characteristics, functions, and origins. Statute law refers to legislation passed by Parliament. These Acts of Parliament are written, codified, and form the most authoritative legal source in the UK due to the principle of parliamentary sovereignty. Statute law can create, amend, or repeal any law and applies uniformly.

In contrast, case law is created by judges through their rulings in individual cases. It is based on the principle of judicial precedent, where decisions made by higher courts bind lower courts. Judges interpret statutes, resolve ambiguities, and, where statutes are silent, can develop legal principles from scratch.

While statute law is supposed to be supreme, case law is said to ensure legal consistency and flexibility by allowing the judiciary to adapt the law to new, complex, or possibly politically inconvenient situations. Parliament can override judicial decisions by passing new statutes, but until that happens, judge-made law has significant force.

Therefore, a situation can arise where the law is not as it appears in an Act of Parliament. Further detached from the democratic process, Acts of Parliament themselves, such as the recent bills regarding the introduction of euthanasia and the decriminalisation of abortion up to the moment of birth, have sometimes never appeared in a manifesto.

The Bell Hotel, Epping

The Bell Hotel case in Epping emerges as a contentious flashpoint at the intersection of planning law, immigration policy, contradictory judgments and local and national political pressures.

Last month, Epping Forest District Council secured a temporary injunction from the High Court, blocking the use of the Bell Hotel for housing asylum seekers. The council argued at the High Court that the site owner, Somani Hotels, (covered in a G-P article here) breached planning rules by not notifying the local authority of its plans for The Bell.

The change in the hotel’s use — from short-term accommodation to long-term residence for asylum seekers — amounted to a material change of use under planning law, for which no permission had been granted. In their case, the council cited local protests, safety concerns, and the hotel’s proximity to schools and care homes.

Mr Justice Stephen Eyre, sitting in the High Court, granted the injunction. He ruled that enforcing planning law took precedence over any hardship imposed on asylum seekers, and rejected both the hotel owners’ case and a late intervention from the Home Office. The judgment signalled judicial deference to local authority concerns, even in the face of the government’s claimed asylum obligations.

However, this decision was appealed by the company and the Home Secretary Yvette Cooper-Balls, who was responsible for placing illegal immigrants at the site. On 29 August 2025, a higher court, the Court of Appeal, led by Lord Justice David Bean, overturned the injunction. The judges criticised the High Court for placing undue weight on the role of community protests as justification for legal action.

They also held that Mr Justice Eyre failed to consider broader systemic impacts, including the Home Office’s claimed statutory duty to provide accommodation for asylum seekers. The ruling allowed the hotel to continue operating while further legal action takes place. The council tried to appeal to the Supreme Court, but the Court of Appeal rejected their request. However, as of Wednesday, 3rd September, it is the council’s stated intention to make a direct request to the Supreme Court.

The judges

If such things revolve around the judges as much as the letter of the law, it begs the question: how impartial are they? The High Court judge who issued the initial injunction, Mr Justice Stephen Eyre, has a reputation for judicial conservatism and an emphasis on procedural correctness. Though until now not high-profile, his rulings often reflect a strict reading of statutory provisions, as was evident in his handling of the planning law arguments in this case.

The 67-year-old privately educated New College, Oxford, graduate is a one time Chancellor, Vicar-General, and Official Principal of the Diocese of Coventry and also former Chancellor of the Diocese of Lichfield. Conservative with both a small and capital ‘C’, he was the Tory Party candidate for Stourbridge in the 2001 General Election, where he received 15,011 votes, coming second to Labour’s Debra Shipley. In 1987, Eyre stood as the Conservative candidate for Hodge Hill, Birmingham, receiving 15,083 votes and coming second to Labour’s Terry Davies.

The court of appeal justices who overturned his decision are also not neutral. David Bean, who stumbled through the reading of the Epping judgement while slumped in an oversized comfy chair as if holding court in a care home day room, is a graduate of Cambridge University with long-standing links to the Labour Party.

The 71-year-old served as chair of the Fabian Society (a Labour-affiliated think tank) and as treasurer of the Society of Labour Lawyers. He also helped found the ‘progressive’ Matrix Chambers alongside Cherie Blair, wife of former Prime Minister Tony Blair. Known for its left-wing orientation, other Matrix Chambers members include prominent Labour figures such as the current Attorney General, Lord Hermer.

Suspiciously, when viewed in the context of a decision regarding illegal immigrants, Llanelli-born Lady Justice Nicola Davies is known for her work on diversity within the judiciary, and serves as a senior liaison judge on diversity issues as well as an Appeal Court judge.

Grammar school girl Dame Nicola Velfor Davies, DBE, was educated at the University of Birmingham (Law) and worked as a City of London investment analyst before returning to law and specialising in medical practice. In the 72-year-old’s official Courts and Tribunals biography, Davies claims to have specialised in medical law encompassing clinical negligence. What she omits to emphasise is that when doing so, she was defending the medically negligent.

This includes her (unsuccessful) defence of paediatrician Sir Roy Meadow, struck off from the British Medical Register after being found to have offered erroneous and misleading evidence that led to wrongful murder convictions of mothers in cases of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (then known as ‘cot deaths’).

As a young barrister, she acted as a junior counsel to two doctors involved in a notorious Cleveland child abuse case. Dame Nicola’s clients were paediatricians Marietta Higgs and Geoffrey Wyatt, who wrongly diagnosed 121 cases of child abuse via their own novel interpretation of an intimate physical examination. Her other medical cases include defending the Bristol Heart Scandal surgeons, found guilty and struck off following professional misconduct after continuing operations on infants despite an attendant high death rate.

In spite of her diversity-enhancing claims to being the first Welsh woman to do this, that and the other (Chancellor of Aberystwyth University, chair of the first all-female Welsh Court of Appeal, first Welsh female QC), in another case she faced criticism for her ‘plummy southern tones’.

A BBC piece noted critics thought her delivery ‘did not help her cause’. Likewise, she ‘frequently resorted to sniping at the prosecution for want of any hard evidence.’ The case in question was Dame Nicola’s unsuccessful defence of another of her medical malpractitioners, Dr Harold Shipman, one of the most prolific serial killers in modern history.

The third Court of Appeal judge was Stephen Cobb. Not quite one of us, Sir Stephen William Scott Cobb, The Right Honourable Lord Justice Cobb, is an old boy of Winchester College (alma mater of former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak). Knighted by David Cameron in 2013, the 63-year-old is the son of former High Court judge Sir John Francis Scott Cobb.

What a shower!

Food for thought

The Bell Hotel ruling reignites a broader debate over judicial impartiality and political bias in the UK legal system within the complex interplay between statute law, judicial interpretation and political prejudice. While statute law provides the formal rules — such as planning regulations — case law determines how those rules are applied in real-world disputes. When courts intervene in politically sensitive areas, as in this case, rulings also emerge as being politically motivated, especially via the partisan affiliations of the judges.
 

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