Shhhh! Davis slips out Cost of Brexit Appeal

Theresa May’s Government has furiously resisted revealing how much public money it spent on its unsuccessful legal bid earlier this year to prevent MPs having a say on leaving the EU. When the High Court ruled in January that the Government could not trigger Article 50 to leave the EU without first winning parliamentary approval the Government unleashed a team of barristers for a Supreme Court challenge.

When that failed it refused all press queries about how much the saga had cost. Keir Starmer, Labour’s Shadow Brexit Secretary called the legal appeal a waste of time and money but the Government’s stonewalling tactics meant the Opposition was unable to say just how expensive a waste of taxpayers’ money it had been.

Unappealing figures

Scroll forward to summer. As Parliament closed for its recess and MPs disappeared for their breaks, David Davis’s Department for Exiting the European Union took advantage of the political “silly season” by quietly publishing its annual report which revealed that apart from £14 million spent on staffing its biggest expense was legal costs of £3.7 million.

The report said that £2.2m was spent on “routine policy”, meaning legal advice provided by the Government Legal Department. Another sum of “approximately £0.7m relates to Government expenditure on Article 50 and Article 127 litigation and £0.5m relates to court ordered third party litigation costs,” it said.

Follow a footnote and the cost of the Government’s legal bid becomes clearer despite the small print size. “Approximately 75% of Article 50 costs (excluding Northern Ireland and other party costs) relate to the Supreme Court appeal,” it said. So the legal bill on Article 50 cost four times more than it should have because of the Government’s determination to fight for the right to deny MPs a vote on the move.

Gina Miller, the leader of the anti-Brexit legal challenge, concluded after the Supreme Court voted 8-3 in her favour in January that “only Parliament can grant rights to the British people, and only Parliament can take them away.”

When MPs did get the vote they supported triggering Article 50 by an overwhelming 498 votes to 114. So why did the Government have such little faith in MPs backing its agenda, especially as Labour also supported it after Jeremy Corbyn issued his strongest “three-line whip” directing his MPs to back the bill?

Hush up

The Department refused multiple Freedom of Information requests to reveal the cost of the appeal on the grounds that the information would eventually be published. Its response to one request a month after the hearing was that the costs of responding to individual requests would not be worthwhile, a line of argument that was ironic given the waster of money on the whole legal campaign.

“Given the necessary preparation and administration involved in publishing information, including collation and submission of the information to Ministers, we do not deem providing this information in response to an FOI request as the most cost effective way of placing this information in the public domain,” it said.

Labour MP Gloria de Piero asked a similar question of the Brexit Department in March. Conservative MP Robin Walker, now a junior minister in the Department, responded that six weeks after the hearing “the Department has not been billed for all costs related to the case. Details of the total costs associated with the case, including the costs of the Supreme Court appeal, will be published in due course after they have been settled.”

“In due course” turned out to mean the “silly season” dump of reports, when MPs and the most senior political journalists were enjoying summer.

by Stewart Vickers

 

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