Cases

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.”

We have received hundreds of emails from devastated students, whose grades have been downgraded and who have lost their university places and job offers, lost funding and scholarships, and completely lost their faith that their Government will help.

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.

Families across the country are struggling to make ends meet. Many workers have lost their jobs or been furloughed, earnings have been slashed, and the price of the weekly shop has gone up. The Office for National Statistics reports that 2.6 million households are struggling to cover expenses such as energy and food, and we know that hundreds of thousands of children have had to skip meals during the coronavirus lockdown.

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.

Every child has the right to a suitable education: that is what the Education Act says. But the Government’s plan to continue education online during the coronavirus lockdown risks leaving a million children behind.

Victory at last. Following judicial review proceedings, issued by Good Law Project alongside noted environmentalists Dale Vince and George Monbiot, Government has confirmed in its Energy White Paper that it does concede the need to review the Energy National Policy Statement.

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.

We brought proceedings with Amalia Illgner against Tyler Brûlé’s media empire, Monocle. Monocle – an empire then given a nine-figure valuation – refused to pay minimum wage to those working in its offices.

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.