An employment tribunal recently dismissed almost all claims in the closely-watched Peggie v Fife Health Board case. Sandie Peggie, a nurse with gender-critical beliefs, sued her employer over its policy allowing a trans woman doctor to use the female changing room. The tribunal found no direct discrimination, no indirect discrimination, and no victimisation. Only one narrow procedural claim succeeded.
For many, this reads as vindication of trans-inclusive policies. But there’s a bigger story liberals need to understand. This case is part of a coordinated litigation campaign operating largely in the shadows, bankrolled by wealthy individuals and organisations whose funding remains deliberately opaque.
Who paid for Sandie Peggie’s legal representation? We don’t know. What other similar cases are they funding? Whether this is an isolated grievance or a test case in a broader strategy? We don’t know. That’s precisely the problem.
Over the past two years, employment tribunals have seen a forty-fold increase in gender-critical belief discrimination cases. Multiple NHS trusts faced legal action within just three months, the Girl Guides received a pre-action letter threatening litigation over their trans-inclusive policies, and the pattern continues to accelerate. The strategy works even without courtroom victories – both the Girl Guides and the Women’s Institute recently withdrew trans-inclusive policies in the face of legal threats, capitulating before cases even reached tribunal.
Beyond the direct policy changes, the litigation serves another purpose: media attention. Each case – win, lose, or settle – generates headlines positioning trans-inclusive policies as legally risky and politically contested. The public controversy itself becomes the victory, shaping discourse and institutional behaviour far beyond any single courtroom.
This isn’t organic growth in workplace disputes. It’s what happens when permanent, well-resourced funding infrastructure emerges. For instance, JK Rowling’s Women’s Fund offers financial backing for strategic legal challenges. This pattern extends beyond trans rights – American Christian nationalist organisations have doubled UK spending on abortion litigation, and climate activists face challenges backed by fossil fuel interests. Unlike crowdfunding campaigns that operate in the open, private funds select and support cases behind closed doors, with no public accounting.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with third-party litigation funding. It enables people without means to challenge powerful defendants. But when it becomes a tool for the wealthy to pursue ideological campaigns, several harms emerge.
The chilling effect is real and measurable. When organisations know they may face endless, well-funded legal challenges for inclusive policies, they retreat – as the Girl Guides and WI demonstrate. Claimants can be instrumentalised, becoming vehicles for someone else’s broader agenda. Legal development gets distorted when well-resourced funders can bring case after case shopping for favourable precedents. Foreign organisations reshape British law according to their values. Most fundamentally, when litigation campaigns operate in shadow, those wielding this power face no public accountability.
The solution isn’t to prevent litigation funding – that would harm access to justice. Nor is it to police which causes are “worthy” – that path leads to censorship. The solution is transparency.
I propose mandatory disclosure requirements that would work simply: when funding exceeds £10,000, when cases are part of coordinated campaigns, or when matters of significant public interest are at stake, funders must disclose their identity, the amount provided, any related cases they’re supporting, and whether they control the litigation strategy. This becomes part of the public court record, enabling courts, defendants, and the public to understand the interests and resources driving cases.
The proposal includes appropriate exceptions for genuine safety concerns or sensitive personal circumstances, but creates a strong presumption in favour of disclosure. It applies uniformly regardless of political orientation or the nature of claims. Small-scale funding remains private; only substantial, strategic, or publicly significant cases trigger disclosure.
The UK Civil Justice Council has made similar recommendations – 58 in total – calling for mandatory disclosure as part of comprehensive litigation funding reform. Similar measures are progressing in Australia and parts of the United States. The momentum for transparency is real and international. The UK government is now considering legislative action.
Liberals should lead on this. Transparency, accountability, and power operating in daylight – these are core liberal values. When wealthy actors use litigation to bypass democratic politics and reshape policy through coordinated legal campaigns funded in the shadows, transparency isn’t just desirable, it’s essential.
It’s time to bring litigation funding out of the shadows and into the light where it belongs.
* Tanya Park is a Lib Dem County, Borough & Town councillor in Eastleigh, Hampshire and writes at A Just Society, a liberal policy project making the case for radical progressive policies grounded in liberal principles.
Follow @libdemvoice.org on Bluesky
Like us on Facebook
Subscribe to our feed
Sign-up for our daily email digest
What's he got?
What remains of the locations where Hue and Cry was filmed
Latest voting intention and leadership ratings opinion polls
Carl Pierce
Roland
Chris Cory
Robert Knight
Alex Macfie
14 Comments
Some of the funding will be flowing from the USA. Trump’s allegations that Britain is in moral decline are supported by wealthy right-wingers and their foundations, who are determined to intervene to ‘save’ Britain from liberalism. We need transparency of donations top charities as well as to legal cases.
This is very important: thanks for altering us to it. Similarly we should be altered to who is funding the so-called Think Tanks whenever they are quoted on the airwaves or in the press. Regularl reminders of who owns the newspapers and social media platforms would also be useful. Big money is fuelling public opinion and it is interested in garnering more of it rather than spreading it around.
This may have unintended consequences, putting off people from funding cases that we consider worthy but others don’t. For example refugee’s rights.
I do see the motive and I can see this proposal could prevent swamping ‘lawfare’ by any political group seeking to change law and the ‘meaning’ of law, whether they are right, left, centre, liberal, radical, conservastive or whatever, and potentially isn’t just of political benefit to those who take this specific view of the rights and wrongs of the peggie case and the ambiguity about the combined meaning of the EA and GRA.
But I can’t see how its going to interact with section 114 of the criminal justice act (but I’m not a lawyer).
Making the existence of parallel litigation admissible in court, and encouraging people to judge the litigation on the pure existence of other litigation funded by similar routes, with the implication it may be vexatious, is potentially murky water, one would think.
@Slamdac it’s a valid concern and one I discuss in the proposal linked in the piece above, you can find it in the “Addressing Concerns” section here – https://ajustsociety.uk/essays/shining-light-on-shadow-litigation-why-we-need-transparency-in-legal-funding
But essentially, “disclosure does not prevent anyone from funding litigation. It simply requires that they do so openly. If a cause is worth funding, surely it’s worth funding publicly. If funders are unwilling to have their involvement known, that itself raises questions about their motivations and confidence in their mission.”
I am 100% in favour of openness and transparency, but this should not divert our attention from the fact that to succeed, legal challenges must be robust in law and independent judges decide. If a case has no merit, it is not likely to succeed. Who is picking up the bill is beside the point.
@Matt (Bristol) This proposal isn’t in relation to criminal cases, but to civil cases. The full policy proposal can be read here – https://tinyurl.com/4aftt4s5
@George Cooper Yes of course, but who’s picking up the bill can certainly be the point…if, like in these anti-trans cases, they’re using the threat of expensive court cases to influence organisations and companies to change their policies and behaviour just beacsue of the sheer cost of going to court, even when their case is weak and likely to fail…winning the case isn’t their objective, however getting media exposure to their cause and changing behaviour is.
Re william wallace’s comments, the US national security strategy has openly said that they want to ‘cultivate resistance to european nations current paths’ !! The US meddling in our affairs is no longer out of the question
I agree greater transparency about funding of legal representation, seems right.
I’m not sure that setting a threshold on disclosure is necessary, just that we need to accept funding may change during the life of a case and thus subsequent disclosures may be necessary.
However, I agree with others that this needs to be thought through as for example it would impact:
a) Insurance backed legal representation which will frequently happen in motoring and personal injury claims.
b) The various class action cases that law firms are now generating, having set up their PPI mis-selling , dieselgate and now cyber security claims factories.
c) Commercial litigation funding by the likes of Therium (funded the GLO class action against the Post Office) .
What is so depressing about this particular subject is that the Supreme Court started with a piece of scientific illiteracy, proceeded by some ramshackle reasoning, and arrived at a conclusion which was indefensible. Their task was to tell us what Parliament intended in passing the Equality Act; and Parliament most certainly did not intend to render the Gender Recognition Act a dead letter.
Had the present Government got a principle or a backbone between the lot of them, the judgment in For a Few Women Scotland could and should have been corrected in short order by a short amending Act. Remember, when in opposition Starmer was so clear in his support for trans women that Sunak felt able to lob in a cheap transphobic dig (“Look at me, Mummy! I said ‘penis’!”) on a day when he knew Brianna Ghey’s mother was in the public gallery. But the reaction to the Supreme Court decision was to immediately adopt the most extreme reading of it. Shameful.
One might wonder whether any of the party’s recent difficulties are in any way related.
Why not just make it mandatory to disclose litigation funding, full stop? (With, perhaps, a low threshold, say £1000, so as not to risk catching the friend who buys a lawyer a pint.)
If you believe in funding a piece of litigation, such as refugee rights, you surely should be happy to say so. If on the other hand you want to hide what you are doing, then that’s because you have something dubious that you want to hide.
So far all Liberal Voice for Women’s efforts to bring the party to recognise the unlawfulness of some of its actions have been paid for by its members – who are also members of the party, and some of whom have been members for decades. There is no dark foreign funding (or even dark British funding) involved.
@Margaret it’s a thought for sure.
@David that’s pretty much what my policy proposal says.
@Zoe Hollowood so you’d support such a policy proposal on litigation funding transparency?