We are seeking a judicial review of how the DWP use a computer algorithm to pick disabled people to be investigated for fraud, because we think it is unfair.
The stages of a judicial review process are:
- We send a legal letter ask the DWP to tell us more about something they are doing because we think they are doing it wrong.
- The DWP can tell us what we want to know and this can solve things.
- But! If they refuse to tell us what we want to know, we send a second legal letter called a Letter Before Action saying if you don’t answer our questions properly, we will ask the court to make you tell us! This is the stage we are at now, the DWP didn’t answer our questions properly so we have told them they have one more chance to tell us or we go to court.
- If the DWP still refuse to tell us what we want to know we put the case before the court who will either grant permission or have a hearing to help them decide if they should grant permission for the case to proceed. If they grant permission, it proceeds to a Judicial Review.
- The Judicial Review, here the court looks through the questions we have asked and the arguments we have made, they also look at what the DWP says back. They come to a decision that is legally binding and can include making the DWP do what we want and answering our questions and revealing if and how their computer systems target disabled people for fraud investigation.
It's worth remembering Judicial Reviews take expert legal work and some money, for the legal expertise we have partnered with Foxglove Legal who are world leaders in bringing such record breaking cases against government misdeeds For the money we have a Crowdjustice site which has already raised over £6,400 (£15,000 is our dream target) This money is needed in case we lose and have to pay some legal costs, if we win, we make the other side (the government and the DWP) pay the costs! If we win we hope that it will improve how the DWP treat people, this will affect millions of people. That’s why we think this is so worth doing, so millions of innocent disabled (and non-disabled) people are not wrongly accused of fraud with all the accompanying distress that causes.
