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Medical shortages challenge, climate change, and our new crowdfunding campaign – Newsletter

25th April 2019

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Hello!

Here is what the Good Law Project has been getting up to recently…

The ‘No Deal’ Brexit medical shortages challenge continues

We have been granted an expedited permission hearing to challenge the Government’s serious shortage protocols (SSPs) for dealing with medicine shortages in the event of a No Deal Brexit. There is no date for the hearing although it will take place shortly.  

However, this case is still hugely underfunded – and the Government is aggressively pursuing maximum costs to (we believe) dissuade us from continuing to scrutinise it generally. Please, if you can, support us here.

An Uber update

As you may recall, we wrote to HMRC asking it to issue protective assessments against Uber for what we believe to be over £1,000,000,000 of unpaid VAT and interest. You can read our letter here.

We have now heard back from HMRC – and we can confirm we will be issuing judicial review proceedings.

Climate change and our children

This feature in Carbon Brief caught our eye – on why children must emit eight times less CO2 than their grandparents. We are speaking to the leading specialist lawyers on environmental law and age discrimination to identify whether and how we can litigate points around the intergenerational unfairness of climate change.

We want to ask courts to address questions of law that chime with the irresistible question put by schoolchildren to the generation that holds power and is burning the planet: “what about MY future?”

Our new crowdfunding campaign

Bringing cases to challenge bad corporate behaviour is very difficult. For example, as things stand, in our case against Uber, if we lost, we’d face a £3 million bill.

Using the threat of costs to bully away accountability has an obvious chilling effect on access to justice. Last month the High Court said, in effect, that there is no public interest in holding Bad Money to account. You can’t get an order that limits your liability to costs – a “protective costs order” – if your target is corporations. We have grave concerns about the implications of the decision and the Good Law Project has appealed against the decision.

But we need your help. Even asking for a protective costs order cost us over £100,000 in adverse costs. We don’t think that is right – but it is the order the court made.

It is no longer safe to rely on Government to defend the law and protect the vulnerable from exploitation by bad money. And, if the High Court’s decision goes unchallenged, public interest actors cannot do so either. This cannot stand.

We have appealed against the Uber decision in order to allow charities and not for profits to hold Bad Money to account. But we need your help to fund the costs of that appeal. Click here for our new crowdfunding campaign.

How can you help

If you think our work will be of interest to friends and family – please send them this email and invite them to join our mailing list. If you like what the Good Law Project is doing, please consider becoming a member or making a one-off donation.

Thank-you,

The Good Law Project

@GoodLawProject

Case

This article is part of our Serious Shortage Protocols case

A No Deal Brexit would cause – the medical evidence demonstrated – drug shortages with manifest risk to the lives of tens or hundreds of thousands.

See more about this case