Magistrates who made a ‘clearly irrational’ order for a gas engineer to pay £22,000 within 28 days were following a ‘standard practice’ which was unlawful, the High Court has ruled.
Justices at Guildford Magistrates Court had ordered a gas engineer – identified only as ‘RAI’ in the High Court’s judgment – to pay the sum in compensation after he admitted benefit fraud. He was also ordered to pay prosecution costs of £6,067.88.
However Mrs Justice Thornton in the High Court quashed the order after hearing ‘the unchallenged contention of the applicant was that his disposable income before the loan repayments was £250 a month’.
‘On the information before the magistrates as to the applicant’s means, it was clearly irrational to require him to pay £22,000 within 28 days’, the judge said.
In their response to the case stated, the magistrates explained that their intention was not for the applicant to pay the sum due within 28 days but for him to pay by instalments according to a repayment plan to be determined by the fines office.
‘We did not expect the applicant to be able to repay the compensation and costs in one go, and it may have taken some time to repay’, they said. ‘Our intention was the applicant would contact the fines office and arrange a suitable repayment plan at a rate he could afford. This is standard practice in Surrey and Sussex Local Justice Area.’
But Mrs Justice Thornton, in a ruling on Tuesday, said: ‘The practice adopted by the magistrates in this regard is unlawful. It is wrong to fix an amount of compensation without regard to the instalments which are capable of being paid by the offender and the period over which those instalments should be paid but rather to leave those questions for the fines office to sort out.’
The judge ordered the case be listed for redetermination by a differently constituted bench.
