Government wields the legal financial cosh

I believe I may have complained on this blog about the way that well-financed commercial operators are able to bully local authority planning departments and protestors. Now it seems that government, too, is racking up costs which it can afford to pay but voluntary organisations cannot.

The Good Law Project reports:

If you have a bottomless pit of money, you can break the law with impunity by making it too expensive for people to go to Court. We increasingly see conduct with that flavour from this Government - but nothing quite like this: Government has estimated it will spend a staggering £1.2 million defending a challenge from Good Law Project. We only expect the hearing to take one day and the facts are simple. When the case was stayed, the costs were about £30,000. They repeatedly refused to give us the estimates of their costs so we could apply for a cap. Then, they told us they had spent over £600,000 and were continuing to spend.

Our lawyers tell us it’s an unprecedented sum. The evidence is that costs incurred by the Government in judicial review proceedings rarely exceed £100,000. We are a small non-profit, funded by donations from members of the public. We cannot carry this kind of risk, a fact the Government well knows. We can’t help but wonder whether killing us, or dissuading us from using the law, is the point of their spending. We have now applied for a cap but are on the hook for a vast sum if we don’t get one.

This may seem rather remote, but it is only by concerned experts like the Good Law Project that cover-ups of dubious contract practices, such as this government has been too fond of, can be exposed. The case referred to concerned a lobbyist, who just happens to be a former Conservative parliamentarian, brought into government as an advisor who touted one of his company's clients for a PPE contract. A clear need for transparency, supported by the law, one would have thought.