Held, permission to proceed with ground 1 refused, claim allowed on ground 2 and dismissed on grounds 3 and 4. (1) Responsibility for setting the licence conditions was determined by section 250(4) of the Criminal Justice Act 2003 which required every licence to include the standard conditions (section 250(4)(a)) but left the decision on other licence conditions to the defendant, as was indicated by the closing words of section 250(4)(b) referring to such conditions as “as the Secretary of State may for the time being specify in the licence”. Section 250(5B), which prevented the defendant from imposing or varying any licence condition (other than the standard licence conditions) save at the direction of the Parole Board applied only to prisoners sentenced under any of sections 226A, 226B and 236A of the 2003 Act and did not apply to prisoners sentenced pursuant to section 227 of the 2003 Act. A decision to set licence conditions did not fall within the ambit of the right to liberty under article 5 of the Human Rights Convention since the setting of conditions when a prisoner was released on licence was some distance from the core value protected by article 5, which was the right not to be arbitrarily detained, and a tenuous connection with a Convention right was not enough. Nor did the claimant possess a relevant “other status” for the purpose of a discrimination claim under article 14 of the Convention. There was strong support in the authorities for the proposition that article 14 “other status” could not be defined solely by the difference in treatment complained of and, in so far as the claimant relied on his status as a prisoner sentenced under section 227 of the 2003 Act, seeking to compare his position with that of a prisoner sentenced under section 226A, he was in a materially identical position to his comparator save for the treatment complained of. Any difference in treatment was in any event justified. It followed that the different allocation of responsibility for setting licence conditions for prisoners sentenced under section 227 and those sentenced under section 226A of the 2003 Act did not amount to unlawful discrimination contrary to article 14 of the Human Rights Convention read with article 5. Furthermore, the power under section 3 of the Human Rights Act 1998 to interpret legislation was strong but not unlimited, the limit being set by consideration of whether the construction required was consistent with the grain or underlying thrust of the legislation. Here it would not be consistent with the grain or thrust of the 2003 Act to erase the defendant’s power to set the licence conditions for section 227 prisoners (paras 22, 25, 26, 28–30, 31, 60, 61).

(2) The claimant ought to have been afforded an opportunity to comment on the proposals to impose the additional conditions and to activate a requirement to require him to wear an electronic tag. No sufficient opportunity had been given to him to make representations at any point before the new licence conditions applied to him. However, where the new licence conditions had ben reviewed at a subsequent meeting where the claimant had been sufficiently involved in the decision-making process and his representations taken into account, that overtook the error that had originally occurred such that declaratory relief was sufficient to address what had gone wrong (paras 47, 60, 61).

(3) Decisions on licence conditions were, by virtue of section 250 of the 2003 Act, decisions for the Secretary of the State and nothing in the document PI 09/2015 “Licence Conditions and Temporary Travel Abroad” issued by the Probation Service altered that as a matter of law. Although the decision-making process might not have followed the template suggested in PI 09/2015, those parts of that document did not prescribe any process that went to the legality of the decision taken. Moreover, taking into consideration the specific circumstances arising in the aftermath of the terrorist attack near London Bridge, the process that was followed was no more than a sensible and entirely permissible adaptation of the model set out in PI 09/2015 (paras 35, 40, 60, 61).

(4) While the claimant’s offender manager had not provided coherent information about the effect of the new condition requiring the claimant “not to attend or organise any meetings or gatherings of more than 50 people without prior permission”, that was a failure at a practical level which did not go to the legality of the licence conditions. The condition was clearly directed to organised forms of association, the operative qualities being organisation and association, and thus, reasonably understood, the condition was sufficiently certain and neither prevented the claimant going to a shop nor prevented him from walking through a busy street or shopping centre. Nor was the continued application of the condition disproportionate where the condition contained a significant element of flexibility with the claimant able to request permission to attend or organise any meeting or gathering which would otherwise fall within the scope of the prohibition (paras 50, 52, 54, 56, 60, 61).