Deputy High Court judge rejects application to discharge car-cruising injunction
A judge was right to grant Birmingham City Council an injunction to prevent car cruising even though other less onerous legal remedies existed.
That ruling has been made by HHJ McKenna, sitting as a deputy High Court judge, in a case brought against the council by Harun Mansoor Sharif.
Birmingham had in 2016 secured an injunction with a power of arrest against anyone ‘car cruising’ including racing on the highway.
This was made pursuant to section 37(1) of the Senior Courts Act 1981, section 1 of the Localism Act 2011, section 222 of the Local Government Act 1972 and section 130 of the Highways Act 1980.
Mr Sharif breached the injunction by racing his Audi A5 car against another vehicle at excessive speed and dangerously, the judgment said.
He was arrested and served a committal notice but sought to have the injunction discharged on the basis that the court had been plainly wrong to grant it and there was an error of principle in the reasoning involved.
In Birmingham City Council v Sharif [2019] EWHC 1268 (QB) HHJ McKenna said the thrust of Mr Sharif’s argument was that a court should not normally grant an injunction where alternative remedies existed, such as a public spaces protection order (PSPO), with less severe penalties attached to any breach.
The judge called this “entirely misplaced [as] PSPOs are not a specific statutory remedy designed or introduced by Parliament to tackle the specific problem of car cruising”.
He added: “It does not seem to me that an intention should be imputed to Parliament that a public authority should be obliged to make PSPOs, which are orders made without recourse to the courts, and still less that the courts should in the exercise of their discretion decline to deal with an application on the basis that the local authority should have made an order itself without coming to court.”
HHJ McKenna said there had never been a doctrine requiring an authority to apply for the remedy representing “the closest fit to the mischief aimed at”, nor any general principle that only in exceptional circumstances should a court grant an injunction where an alternative, specific statutory remedy is available or that the court should not do so where a breach can carry more severe sanctions than breach of a PSPO.
He added: “In this case, the court had ample evidence of the previous attempts made by the West Midlands Police to address car cruising and to the effect that those attempts have proved inadequate and therefore to conclude that the granting of the injunction was appropriate.”
