That view has been endorsed by senior officials. Speaking to The Times in January, the Cabinet Secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood complained that "the threat of judicial review imposes much more process on us than there used to be". An unnamed special adviser, quoted in the same report, said the threat of judicial review "produces this great artifice of going through the motions with consultations that aren't really consultations. They are only there to show the lawyers you've had a consultation."

We shall see whether this is true of the government's consultation on judicial review. Its main proposal is to abolish oral applications for permission in cases where there has already been some sort of prior judicial process or where a judge has already decided by reading a written application that a claim is totally without merit. Fees would increase from £275 to as much as £705, though these would not be paid by those qualifying for legal aid, so the change would have little effect on immigration and asylum claimants, who often have no means. 

The paper attracted several highly critical responses. The Constitutional and Administrative Law Bar Association even suggested that any reforms based on such a "flawed" consultation might themselves be challenged by way of judicial review. The Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law said the proposals threaten access to justice and legal accountability. If judicial review has such a negative effect on decision-makers, the answer is to educate them in what the law requires. Most critics condemned the complete absence of empirical research or statistical justification for the government's proposals. 

Professor Maurice Sunkin of Essex University, who has conducted research into judicial review claims, believes the government is overestimating the failure rate at the permission stage. "The weakness of the evidence-base for these reforms is startling and worrying," he said. "We can only hope that the government will take the consultation responses seriously and think again before introducing reforms that will undermine the integrity of the judicial review process without achieving the government's desired aims."

Past experience suggests that this may be a vain hope.