Prime Minister David Cameron has announced plans to reform the Judicial Review process – claiming that cases can be costly and can clog up the courts and delay justice. The risk of a Judicial Review can also hold up major infrastructure projects.

Mr Cameron said Judicial Reviews are "...a massive growth industry in Britain today."

"Back in 1998," he added, "there were four and a half thousand applications for review and that number almost tripled in a decade. Of course some are well-founded, as we saw with the West Coast mainline decision. But let's face it: so many are completely pointless. Last year, an application was around 5 times more likely to be refused than granted.

"We urgently needed to get a grip on this. So here's what we're going to do: reduce the time limit when people can bring cases, charge more for reviews so people think twice about time-wasting and instead of giving hopeless cases up to four bites of the cherry to appeal a decision, we will halve that to two."

The announcement was made during a speech to the annual meeting of the employers' body the CBI on 19 November, in which the PM set out how he believes Britain can be made more competitive in the 'global race'. The Prime Minister said that success will come from taking tough decisions on the deficit, reforming our education system, and taking steps towards leaner, faster government.

In his public law blog, Adam Chapman of Kingsley Napley wrote: "The Prime Minister is missing the point – it is a myth that judicial review is stopping the government from proceeding with policies to help boost the economy. Although there has been significant growth in the number of judicial review cases brought, the increase has been in cases about immigration and asylum – it's nothing to do with stopping the Government from taking steps to assist business. In non-immigration and asylum cases, the number of cases has actually gone down since 2006."