Cases

In every corner of public life, the Tories are or look to be bending the resources of the state to their own private advantage.

Leaked documents revealed that ‘Operation Moonshot’, the Government’s plan to increase its Coronavirus testing programme, was based on technology that didn’t even exist yet – and would cost over £100 billion. But, in March 2021, the courts refused permission for a judicial review.

In 1539, Henry VIII gained the right to legislate by decree, enabling him to bypass Parliament altogether. And now Boris Johnson, the man who has already tried and failed to suspend Parliament, is taking further cues on democracy from a Tudor King.

Together with EveryDoctor, we launched legal proceedings against the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) over the award of a PPE contract to a jeweller from Florida, who had no previous experience supplying PPE.

In April, Government announced that they supported the creation of the UK Rapid Test Consortium (UK-RTC). The idea was that the companies and institutions involved would create a rapid antibody test. On 2nd June, Government awarded a contract worth £10 million to Abingdon Health for the materials needed to produce the test. On 14th August, they handed Abingdon Health another contract worth a staggering £75 million.

Each week it seems another individual secures a role of vital public importance without any advertisement or fair process – and very often that individual has personal and political connections to Government.

The High Court has now ruled “The Secretary of State acted unlawfully by failing to comply with the Transparency Policy” and that “there is now no dispute that, in a substantial number of cases, the Secretary of State breached his legal obligation to publish Contract Award Notices within 30 days of the award of contracts.”

This legal campaign helped draw wide attention to the institutionalisation of cronyism in the VIP lane. The Court found that the VIP lane, through which Ayanda and Pestfix, won their contracts, was illegal.

The High Court has now ruled Michael Gove broke the law by giving a contract to a communications agency run by long time associates of him and Dominic Cummings.

Frontline NHS staff and care workers are putting their lives at risk because of the Government’s failure to provide adequate PPE. Doctors are having to wear visors made by teenagers on 3D printers. Care workers are being told to share the same mask. A number of the protective gowns that the Government flew in from Turkey have been deemed unsafe for use and are now sat in a warehouse gathering dust.

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

Parliament adopted the Taxation (Cross-border Trade) Act 2018 (section 55) which prevented the Government from concluding an agreement pursuant to which Northern Ireland would have different customs rules than the rest of the UK. We contended that the Withdrawal Agreement agreed in 2019 had that effect and was therefore illegal.

The Prime Minister stated that the UK would leave the EU on 31 October 2019 come what may, statements that could not be reconciled with his clear legal obligations under the Benn Act to request an extension.

We believe Uber has broken the law by failing to charge VAT on the taxi services it offers. The sums involved are enormous – perhaps a quarter of a billion pounds a year of VAT alone. And we don’t have confidence the tax man will collect that tax itself. So we have gone after Uber, and HMRC, ourselves.

Before Ms Miller’s case emerged into the public eye, we crowdfunded the case that eventually became the ‘People’s Challenge’. Alongside Ms Miller we successfully challenged the Government’s position that Article 50 could be triggered without Parliamentary authorisation.

The DUP admitted to having allowed itself to be used to funnel cash from a shadowy group called the Constitutional Research Council to the Leave side of the Referendum campaign. We believed – following the High Court’s decision in our case against the Electoral Commission – that the Constitutional Research Council had broken the law by not declaring the cash as its own spending. And we believed the DUP had broken the law by not properly checking the source of the cash.