Judicial deference and the hollowing out of welfare rights

The recent judgment R (Jwanczuk) v Secretary of State for Work and Pensions [2025] UKSC 42 has arguably shown the Supreme Court to be parliament’s most willing servant and least trenchant critics. Out of what they categorise as ‘respect for the boundaries between legality and the political process’ the Supreme Court saw fit to wave through legislation that they accept runs contrary to Art 14 ECHR and discriminates against disabled people. 

The willingness of the courts to contort themselves to avoid making findings of discrimination in the social welfare context has been an increasingly frustrating feature of their decision-making , with a particular acceleration evident recently.  

Those of us working in the area over the last three decades have seen a shift from a supportive to a punitive social welfare system and have sought to ameliorate the impact on our clients through the courts. The various cases around the scrapped two-child benefit limit are indicative of a markedly deferential approach by the Supreme Court in cases which touch upon socio-economic questions, even where the legislation being challenged runs contrary to the stated policy aims of the government.  

In Jwanczuk the Supreme Court was prepared to hold that if the Secretary of State put forward a ‘legitimate aim’ for implementing a policy then it should allow the ‘widest margin of appreciation’.  

In the social welfare context, the Supreme Court held that “there are no legal standards by which a court can decide where the balance should be struck” [152].  

In my view, that is to discard and disregard many decades of jurisprudence where courts have somehow managed to find a way to apply a sensible and objective legal standard, backed by primary legislation (such as the Human Rights Act) and principles derived from the European Convention on Human Rights.  

The Supreme Court could have referred itself more fulsomely to the decision in Guberina v Croatia (Application no. 23682/13) rather than apparently confecting ways to escape its necessary consequences and failing to ensure that where legislation differentiates between categories of people it is a “wise differentiation” [11] JD [2020] HRLR 5. 

The Supreme Court’s application of a wide margin of appreciation in respect of decisions in the socio-economic sphere has effectively neutered them as a force. The prevailing view being that decisions made by the government in relation to economic or social strategy, in the field of social welfare, are to be viewed as an inevitability unworthy of further legal analysis, particularly in the context of discrimination. This approach is in furtherance of what academic Mark Fisher called ‘capitalist realism’, a failure to consider an alternative way of organising society outside of the current paradigm. In the Jwanczuk case the alternative being a benefits system that does not actively place disabled people at a particular disadvantage.  

As criticisms of the judiciary, from both the press and parliamentarians, have become increasingly intemperate there has been a corresponding diminution in the willingness of the courts to fulfil their constitutional function. This failure to hold power (the executive) to account is particularly stark in the field of social welfare. Politically motivated attacks on the recipients of welfare benefits have sought to make them pariahs in society. The very type of people who most need the support of an objective and rational justice system. Instead of holding the line and continuing to fulfil their constitutional function the courts have sidestepped issues which they consider give rise to “questions of political controversy” [180] R (SC) v Secretary of State for Work and pensions & Others [2021] UKSC 26. 

The ongoing failure of the courts to apply a consistent, or in some cases any, legal standard in respect of challenges brought on behalf of recipients of social welfare is, arguably, itself a political decision. To my mind, there can be few more fundamentally political decisions than the judiciary ceding power to the other branches of government under our (in)famously unwritten constitution.  

On the current evidence alarm bells should be ringing for all of us with a keen interest in the constitutional role of the courts as a necessary counterbalance to the more populist urges of the government.