The speaker of the House of Commons has been accused of ‘acting outrageously’ after he triggered an unprecedented government challenge to undermine the landmark VAT on private school fees case.
The Government launched an ‘opportunistic’ 11th hour bid to rule out key evidence at the end of the recent landmark judicial review into the controversial tax after Sir Lindsay Hoyle called it into question.
And now the High Court has ruled that an emergency hearing should be held on Monday to look at whether the National Audit Office (NAO) report into the ‘broken’ special educational needs (SEN) system was admissible in court.
Monday’s hearing is set to cost the taxpayer tens of thousands of pounds in addition to the vast costs of the original hearing as all of the original parties – including the Government’s team of four crack KCs – have been summoned back to the court.
The Speaker will also have his own leading barrister in court, David Manknell KC.
The NAO report was heavily relied on in the original hearing by the parents of children with SEN and by the Independent Schools Council to demonstrate that SEN children displaced from private schools could not receive the education they needed in the state sector.
Their actions against the Chancellor Rachel Reeves who has levied the new tax were held together over three days in one of the largest cases ever seen in the administrative division of the High Court in front of three senior judges.
Parents bringing the case say the tax breaches their children’s rights to have the education they need because it makes it unaffordable.
But the government has claimed that their children who are among the thousands potentially forced to quit their current schools because of rising costs could all be satisfactorily educated by the state.
The speaker of the House of Commons Sir Lindsay Hoyle (pictured here in 2024) has been accused of ‘acting outrageously’ in the latest in the case of VAT on private school fees
Chancellor Rachel Reeves (pictured in March, 2025) has levied the new tax
Ironically, the previously undisputed NAO report has widely been used since its publication in October 2024 by the government itself – including by Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson – to highlight the failure of SEN provision in the state sector.
But the Speaker queried whether parents of SEN children could rely on its stark findings about the breakdown of the SEN system themselves.
An insider told the Mail on Sunday that at the start of the early April hearing ‘the admissibility of this key evidence’ was not being determined because ‘the Speaker suddenly announced a concern about the NAO report’, adding:
‘The issue went quiet; then at the end of the hearing the government, having raised no concern about the use of the NAO report in the previous four months since the claim was commenced, opportunistically stated that they did indeed object to the use of the report.’
The insider added: ‘The Speaker and the Government are behaving pretty outrageously on this.
‘The NAO report into SEN provision cited extensive government data and concluded in hard-hitting terms that the SEN system was broken, failing thousands of vulnerable children and in need of urgent reform.
‘The government did not dispute the findings, and various government ministers acknowledged the issue and promised reform.’
Accusing the government of ‘underhand conduct in raising no concerns whatsoever throughout the entire proceedings and then jumping on the bandwagon right at the end’, he said it would be a ‘real injustice’ if families were prevented from relying on published data ‘after the trial has ended’.
Ironically, the NAO report has widely been used by the government itself – including by Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson (pictured)
The Speaker will also have his own leading barrister in court, David Manknell KC, for Monday’s hearing
The Mail on Sunday has previously exclusively revealed that the Chancellor – who has called private school parents ‘snobs’ – had lined up a team of top KCs – the most expensive barristers in the land – to fight parents who has crowdfunded to bring the action.
Judgement on the three day judicial review had originally been expected within weeks but the emergency hearing throws the process into disarray.
Losing the case could force the Government to abandon the tax, which affects all 550,000 pupils in the independent sector. Around 100,000 of these have special educational needs.
Questioning why the government was going to such lengths to prevent the NAO report being used, James Gardner of SinclairsLaw, representing the claimant group, said:
‘The NAO report is a truly important document – it lays bare the severity of the funding crisis that means the most vulnerable pupils are not getting the educational support that they need.
‘Why is the Government so desperate to prevent it from being used in Court? Do they not want children with SEN to get the justice that they deserve?’
A House of Commons spokesperson declined to comment.
