The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (SSWP) accused of clogging up legal system
The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (SSWP) behaves like “a serial litigant” and should be made to pay costs where he behaves “unreasonably”.
Kirklees Law Centre lawyer Tom Royston, writing in NLJ, also claims the SSWP “habitually refuses to settle” social security cases and clogs up the legal system, producing about 265,000 final hearings last year (by comparison, there are 63,000 non-family civil litigation final hearings in the county court each year).
Royston makes the argument that, for the SSWP, making bad decisions, refusing to change them, and consequently losing at tribunal is cheap.
Yet, while it costs the department about £55 to defend an appeal, it costs HM Courts and Tribunal Service about £293 to hold the appeal and, if legal aid is granted, it costs the state a further £167 in fees, says Royston.
He says statistics show that the department loses half of all oral tribunal hearings yet revise decisions prior to the hearing in only four per cent of cases. Royston's solution is to make the SSWP liable to costs, thus introducing an incentive to settle and saving the public purse. “In tribunal litigation, permitting a hopeless decision to proceed to tribunal costs the SSWP little or nothing,” writes Royston.
“In contrast, scrutinising it pre-hearing costs money. It is rarely economically rational for the SSWP to expend resources making the right decision in the first place, or to investigate later settlement.
“If losing carried costs risks, the balance would shift.”
The Department for Work and Pensions declined to comment.
