Government Spent £80m Fighting Legal Challenges Against The Home Office Last Year
Former Conservative home secretaries James Cleverly and Suella Braverman (Alamy)
4 min read
The Government spent more than £79m fighting legal challenges against the Home Office in 2023 — more than in the previous three years combined.
A Freedom of Information Request by the Refugee and Migrant Forum of Essex and London (RAMFEL), shared exclusively with PoliticsHome, found that the Conservative administration spent £79,603,815 on judicial reviews against the Home Office last year.
Between 24 July 2019 and 21 September 2021, a period covering just over three years, government spent nearly £77m on legal challenges against the department.
Nick Beales, Head of Campaigning at the Refugee and Migrant Forum of Essex and London, said the figures showed that the Home Office, which in 2023 had Suella Braverman and then James Cleverly as home secretary, was “determined to defend every challenge" as it sought to fulfil then-prime minister Rishi Sunak's pledge to "stop" small boat crossings.
“Challenging government decisions has always happened, but these figures clearly demonstrate that the Conservative government was facing more challenges than ever, and that they in turn were refusing to concede cases,” he told PoliticsHome.
Jo Wilding, a barrister focused on migration and asylum and lecturer at the University of Sussex, said the now-dead Rwanda deportation scheme, the introduction and implementation of the Nationality and Borders Act and Illegal Migration Act, and ministers using barges, airfields and barracks to accommodate asylum seekers, would have all been policy decisions that led to an increase in litigation against the Home Office.
“And some of the litigation will arise from just generally bad practice in the Home Office, including the performative cruelty of a lot of its policies and conduct, and delays in decision making and poor administration,” she said.
A Home Office spokesperson said these costs relate to decisions made by "the previous administration".
They told PoliticsHome: "These policies were created under the previous administration. The public will always expect us to maintain a firm and fair immigration system, which often means defending cases in court.
“This Government has already taken steps to save money for the taxpayer by scrapping the Rwanda partnership and tackling the asylum backlog to reduce the use of asylum accommodation.”
Since entering office, Keir Starmer's Labour Government has scrapped the Tory policy of deporting migrants to Rwanda, arguing that it was an ineffective "gimmick". Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has set up what Labour calls the 'UK Border Security Command' with the aim of tackling small boats crossings and the smuggling gangs behind them.
412 migrants have arrived in the UK on small boats in the last seven days at the time of writing.
Beales said the significant increase in the amount of money spent on litigation last year also reflects a breakdown in communication between the then-government and those working in the immigration and asylum sector. He argued that the Home Office ignored concerns raised by the sector, meaning the only option to be heard was litigation.
“For us in the sector, it would be far easier, cheaper and more efficient if we had been able to suggest changes to systems, rules, procedures and practices that may have improved the lives of the people we work for,” he said.
“The Conservative government had no interest in engagement and was solely concerned with appearing tough on immigration, no matter the cost.”
The findings are the latest figures to illustrate how Home Office expenditure increased as Tory ministers tried to deliver results on stopping people reaching the UK in small boats. Putting the Channel crossings to end was one of Sunak's main policy pledges before he went on to lose the 4 July General Election to Starmer's Labour.
Last week, PoliticsHome reported that the department spent well over half a billion pounds on temporary staff in the last two years as it tried to tackle a backlog in asylum applications.
The Home Office spent around £524m on agency fees in that period, according to its latest annual accounts, which they said was in part to “to deal with backlogs in migrant casework, passport application/examination, and asylum applications”. In contrast, the Home Office spent just £88.8m on temporary staff in 2019-2020.
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