Government Spent £80m Fighting Legal Challenges Against The Home Office Last Year

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