Administrative Law

Associated Provincial Picture Houses Ltd. v. Wednesbury Corporation

(1948) 1 KB 223

Facts

Wednesbury Corporation granted a cinema licence for Sunday shows.
The licence had a condition: children under 15 could not be admitted, even with adults.
The cinema company challenged this condition as unreasonable and beyond the authority’s power.
The statute allowed the authority to impose conditions it thought fit.

When can a court interfere with an administrative authority’s discretionary decision on the ground of unreasonableness?

Courts do not sit in appeal over administrative decisions.
They cannot replace the authority’s view with their own view.
A decision can be struck down only if:
irrelevant considerations were taken into account;
relevant considerations were ignored;
the decision was so unreasonable that no reasonable authority could have made it.

The Court accepted that the local authority had wide discretion while granting cinema licences.
The question was not whether the court personally agreed with the “no children under 15” condition.
The court’s role was only to check whether the authority had crossed legal limits.
The authority had considered public interest, Sunday entertainment, and children’s welfare.
These were not irrelevant considerations.
The condition may have been strict, but it was not absurd or perverse.
The Court said that administrative discretion allows a range of possible reasonable choices.
Merely because another authority, or even the court, might have imposed a different condition does not make this condition unlawful.
Therefore, the decision did not reach the high threshold of Wednesbury unreasonableness.

The appeal was dismissed.
The condition was upheld.
The Court held that the local authority had acted within the limits of its statutory power.
The case created the famous Wednesbury test: courts interfere only when the decision is legally unreasonable, not merely because it is harsh, strict, or debatable.
This case is important because it shows the limited role of judicial review in administrative discretion.
Judicial review checks legality, not the merits or wisdom of the decision.
Your PPT also frames Wednesbury as a standard where the decision must be so perverse that no reasonable public authority would arrive at it.