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Public Sector High Court Litigation in 2026: Key trends from 2014-2025

By Tom Whittaker

6 May 2026 11 min read

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What are the trends we can see for Public Sector High Court Litigation in England and Wales?

Burges Salmon’s expert Public Sector Litigation team continues to collaborate with market-leading data analysis platform Solomonic to analyse over 8550 claims involving more than 1291 public sector parties, providing a unique insight into Public Sector High Court litigation.

The report offers valuable insights into the dynamics of public sector litigation, including:

key overall trends for public sector organisations in High Court litigation, with comparisons against litigation trends for other types of parties;
analysis of different groups of public sector organisations to identify how litigation dynamics differ between types of public sector organisation;
insights into how court data can be used to help parties navigate litigation.

What are the key insights for 2025?

Claim volumes are rising across the board – total claims for 2025 were 855 compared to 576 in 2024. This bucks an otherwise overall downward trend over the last eleven years. Time will tell whether this is a short-term increase, as seen in 2015/2016, or a long term change;
This increase is driven by more claims against public sector organisations – with most, but not all, public sector types facing an increase in civil claims and civil judicial reviews;
Median time to settlement and judgment in Public Sector High Court Litigation shows that disputes can take years to resolve, whilst for judicial reviews the median time taken from claim to hearings has fallen for all tracks;
We can expect the increasing caseload for public sector organisations to have an overall impact for years to come. This is because most cases settle, especially where public sector organisations are defendants, and median times to settlement have been increasing.

Using court data for case strategy and management

Our collaboration with Solomonic continues to help us leverage data analytics to have more informed discussions with clients about individual cases, prepare case strategy, and effective case management.

In-house counsel may wish to consider:

what data is available to assist in analysing and preparing for a specific case?
what data is available to understand what is happening in the market so that I can anticipate issues and benchmark against similar organisations?
what does the data not show? What are the limitations or assumptions behind the data?

If you would like to know more about how data can help you – from monitoring litigation to informing case strategy – please get in touch.

Trend 1: Claim volume is rising

Key Takeaways:

Public Sector High Court litigation and Judicial Reviews have generally tracked each other over the last 11 years. Both were following a slight downward trend since 2014.

However, in 2025, Public Sector High Court litigation has risen alongside other High Court litigation, and Civil Judicial Reviews. At the same time Criminal Judicial Reviews have remained flat.

Why it matters:

It’s not clear what is driving these changes. The similarity across civil disputes suggests that litigation activity may reflect macroeconomic conditions.

This shows that those in the public sector are not immune to a generally more litigious environment. However, as shown in the following analysis, where this activity occurs will vary.

Trend 2: Public Sector organisations as the Defendant

Key Takeaways:

The increase in activity in Public Sector High Court litigation in 2025, from 554 cases in 2024 to 855 cases in 2025 (54% increase), was largely due to an increase in number of claims against Central Government, Local Authorities and ALBs. In contrast, claims against Public Services and Regulators remained relatively steady, consistent since 2019.

The number of claims brought by the Public Sector has also increased, from 121 in 2024 to 141 in 2025 (16% increase). This is a relatively small increase compared to claims brought against the Public Sector.

The data shows that this increase in claimant activity was seen across the Public Sector, except for Local Authorities which saw a decrease in claims brought by them overall.

Why it matters:

Whilst overall litigation activity has increased notably in 2025 compared to 2024, the data shows that the impact is not spread evenly and is focussed more on claims where ALBs, local and central government are the defendants.

There may be an effect of claims against Public Sector bodies returning to levels last seen pre-Covid.

Public Sector organisations need to be able to deal with a growing and evolving case load, potentially shifting from claimant to defendant work, anticipating the types of issues they need to be prepared to deal with.

Types of cases

The sectors and types of disputes involved in Public Sector High Court Litigation in 2025 are similar to those seen across the last 10 years.

In 2025, key sectors for claimants in cases where the public sector organisation was the defendant included real estate, technology, professional services, finance, and construction. The main types of disputes included alleged breach of statutory duty, procurement disputes, breach of contract, human rights, and negligence disputes.

Why this matters

Public Sector organisations need to be ready for the legal and factual matters in their disputes, having the right internal capabilities and external counsel.

They also need to be able to anticipate which types of work or counterparties may present greater litigation risk, requiring careful legal risk management. Public Sector organisations can build upon previous experience but need to keep an eye to the future.

Trend 3: Case outcomes

Key takeaways:

It is difficult to identify comprehensively whether cases have settled. If there is no positive indication on the court file, Solomonic presumes that there has been settlement if a court action (which has been acknowledged or for which a Defence has been filed) has not had any activity for one year or longer. In a small number of cases this presumption may not be correct, for example, where a claim is stayed pending the outcome of another dispute. However, it is clear when a case reaches judgment.

We can see that, overall, cases involving Public Sector as claimants settle (or otherwise do not reach judgment) on average less than in all other claims. There is variation between the averages for different public sector sub-groups.

In contrast, where public sector organisations are defendants, they settle more on average than when they are a claimant. Notably, where Central Government, Local Authorities, and Public Services are defendants, settlement rates are around the same, and sometimes higher than the average settlement rates for all other High Court litigation.

It is also notable that there are few claims formally withdrawn overall, suggesting that almost all claims brought by or against public sector organisations reach settlement or judgment.

Why this matters:

Sometimes cases are unlikely to settle, for example, because they are brought to help establish precedent. However, the data shows that most cases, whether in the Public Sector or more broadly, settle.

This impacts case strategy and the need to consider from the outset the likelihood of settlement and what can be done to improve chances of settlement, whilst keeping the costs and time of conducting the litigation reasonable and proportionate.

Trend 4: Time to settlement and judgment

Key Takeaways:

The data shows it can take potentially years to reach settlement or judgment. Further, it is taking longer for the median case to reach settlement than it is for judgment and the gap is widening. There are many reasons why this may be, for example, cases could be becoming more complex legally, stages such as disclosure could be taking longer, and the availability of court time may be a factor.

There are also potentially many reasons why the gap between time to settlement and time to judgment has increased. One is that parties may be building in more time for alternative dispute resolution.

The data also shows that time taken to settlement is not spread evenly across public sector organisations. The range of times taken to settlement differs, both for the middle half of cases (the 25^th to 75^th percentile) and for the outliers. This may reflect the different nature of the cases involved but also different priorities and governance requirements for each different type of organisation.

Why this matters:

Public Sector organisations involved with litigation need to be realistic about how long their dispute may take. This helps, for example, when considering what resources and external support are required and when, and the potential costs involved with the litigation.

Knowing the range and average times taken to settlement or judgment helps inform the potential range of scenarios that may play out in a specific case and for which an organisation could prepare.

Methodology

Included Data

Public sector High Court litigation data is from the High Court Chancery and Kings Bench, and the Competition and Appeals Tribunal. Claims analysed are those where the Claim Form has been filed and the defendant has either served an Acknowledgement of Service or Defence (where a Particulars of Claim has been served). Judicial reviews are held in the Administrative Court. The relevant data is available from MOJ here but otherwise is available in the same way that High Court claim data is and so has been analysed separately.

Excluded Data

The following has been excluded from the analysis in the report:

Claims which have been settled or been withdrawn during pre-action or before the defendant serves an Acknowledgement of Service or Defence.
Claims – Company, insolvency, personal injury, medical negligence.
Types of party – Foreign states/bodies, charities, the NHS Trusts (but not business services), political parties, private companies (save for where a public body is a Person of Significant Control of the company or a parent company), the Intellectual Property Office, academic institutions, religious institutions, and the Registrar of Companies.

Public Sector sub-group analysis

Parties analysed were grouped into the following sub-groups:

Central Government – Ministerial Departments (or parts of), Secretaries of State, other Ministers and UK Government.
Local Authorities – Local government authorities including councils, and their representatives such as Mayors. Local government authorities are established by various Local Government Acts.
Regulators – Bodies (or parts of) that are responsible for ensuring that organisations and/or professionals are complying with laws or official rules. These can also be arm’s length bodies (ALBs) but have been separated for analysis due to their regulatory function.
Public services – Bodies (or parts of) that provide services, including goods or facilities of a public nature, though excluding central government, local authorities and regulators (see above definitions). For example, emergency services, prison services and public transportation.
Arm’s Length Bodies (known as ALBs): A category of public bodies which are administratively classified by the Cabinet Office. The three types of ALBs are executive agency, non-departmental public body and non-ministerial department. We have excluded ALBs from this category where they also fall within regulators or public services.