Associated Provincial Picture Houses Ltd v Wednesbury Corporation

Associated Provincial Picture Houses v Wednesbury Corporation
Former Wednesbury Cinema
Court	Court of Appeal of England and Wales
Decided	November 10, 1947 (1947-11-10)
Citation	[1948] 1 KB 223, [1947] EWCA Civ 1
Court membership
Judges sitting	Lord Greene, Somervell LJ, Singleton J
Keywords
Judicial review

Associated Provincial Picture Houses Ltd. v Wednesbury Corporation [1948] 1 KB 223^[1] is an English law case that sets out the standard of unreasonableness in the decision of a public body, which would make it liable to be quashed on judicial review, known as Wednesbury unreasonableness.

The court gave three conditions on which it would intervene to correct a bad administrative decision, including on grounds of its unreasonableness in the special sense later articulated in Council of Civil Service Unions v Minister for the Civil Service^[2] by Lord Diplock:

So outrageous in its defiance of logic or accepted moral standards that no sensible person who had applied his mind to the question to be decided could have arrived at it.