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Administrative justice, discretion and the ‘welfare to work’ project

In this special edition of the journal to mark the retirement of Martin Partington, I am sure it is permissible to depart from the usual protocols of the academic article to say something unashamedly personal and subjective. I will not go overboard, but I will say that the decision of the editors to use the journal for such a purpose seemed entirely justified and appropriate given Martin Partington’s contribution to the analysis and practice of administrative law and to socio-legal research. Martin’s scholarship is there for all to see, but what will have gone unseen, I suspect, and something I have benefited from, is his constructive engagement, encouragement and advice to people less knowledgeable and experienced than himself. To be asked to contribute to this volume gave me one of the easiest decisions I have made for a long time. Given Martin’s longstanding interest in administrative justice (including the establishment of the Centre for the Study of Administrative Justice at the University of Bristol in the 1990s), it seemed opportune to revisit its relevance to some contemporary developments in the field of social welfare. In the introduction to the seminal book he edited with Michael Harris, Administrative justice in the 21st century (1999), we find a fair summing up of the state of the debate in 1997: ‘... there is considerable disagreement about the meaning of the concept of ‘‘administrative justice’’’ (Harris and Partington 1999, p. 2). One of the areas of disagreement was about whether administrative justice was relevant at the level of initial decisions made by the thousands of organisations implementing public policy or whether it should be confined to appeals and redress mechanisms, i.e. to the world of tribunals and courts. That disagreement probably continues ten years on, but if one surveys the literature on administrative justice then there is a strong case for arguing that there has been a shift towards a more inclusive view of administrative justice. Harris and Partington certainly shared this view by aligning themselves with many of the contributors to their edited volume whose perception of ‘... administrative justice ... embraces the whole range of decision-taking, from an initial decision to the ultimate level of appeal’ (1999, p. 2). That administrative justice has relevance to initial decision-making is important to emphasise because it is at this level that most people have any contact with the organisations making decisions that affect their lives. So, if we have any concern to improve the interactions between citizens and the state then we are likely to