A judge asked to consider the legality of prosecutions by railway operators using the single justice procedure has declared all prosecutions under two subsections of the Railways Act invalid.

Senior district judge and chief magistrate for England and Wales Paul Goldspring said railway operators Northern Trains Limited and Greater Anglia had conceded that the SJP should not have been used to prosecute offences contrary to section 5(1) or 5(3) of the Regulations of the Railway Act (RRA) 1889. Fines and costs paid following these convictions should be refunded.

Section 5(1) – fail to produce a ticket for inspection – is a summary only non-imprisonable offence under the RRA while section 5(3) covers offences in which someone does not pay their full fare or gives a railway company officer a false name or address. The offence under section 5(1), the judgment acknowledged, is not included within the definition of a railway offence.

HMCTS and the judge had been asked to review six test cases for the purposes of considering and deciding what the correct legal remedy is.

Speaking of the importance of the ruling, the judge said: ‘The implications are wide ranging because the same issue applies to over 74,000 cases where the same unlawful prosecutions took place.’

He added: ‘The problem became known when the Department for Transport notified the Ministry of Justice that four train operating companies have, over several years, prosecuted offences through the single justice procedure when this was not permissible.’

The judge added: ‘Parliament did not envisage these offences being prosecuted through the SJP, they should never have been brought through SJP in the first place, that is, to my mind, a paradigm nullity.’ The judge continued: ‘Declaring all relevant prosecutions a nullity requires a simple declaration by the court and that is all, the court could even list all relevant cases together and do so. The overriding objective and particularly in summary justice fall in favour of the most expedient and procedurally straightforward method of disposal where alternatives are available.

‘For all those reasons I am satisfied the correct approach is to declare each of the above cases void ab initio and a nullity and I do so.’

Tom Franklin, chief executive of the Magistrates’ Association, said the ruling had ‘big implications for tens of thousands of people’. He added: ‘There are serious questions that the prosecuting authorities, in this case the train companies, need to answer as to how this was allowed to happen.

'This supports our call for reform of the SJP. For some time now, the Magistrates’ Association has been calling for it to be more open and transparent, consistent, and fairer particularly for more vulnerable defendants such as those who are elderly or infirm.

‘While many aspects of the SJP work well, we would like to see measures put in place to protect the most vulnerable defendants. Boosting transparency is needed by publishing more data on the SJP [and] the government should also make provision for SJP sittings to be observable by accredited journalists.’