Prince Harry loses bid for second legal challenge against the Home Office over the decision to bar him from paying for Met Police security detail during trips to the UK
Prince Harry has lost his bid for a second legal challenge against the Home Office over his security arrangements when in the UK.
The Duke of Sussex, 38, was seeking the go-ahead from the High Court to secure a judicial review over a decision that he should not be allowed to pay privately for his own protective security.
At a hearing earlier this month, a judge was asked by Harry’s legal team to allow the duke to bring a case over decisions taken by the Home Office and the Executive Committee for the Protection of Royalty and Public Figures (Ravec) – which falls under the remit of the department – in December 2021 and February 2022.
The estranged Duke had wanted to maintain, when in Britain, the Royal and Specialist Protection command (RASP) armed squad who protected him when he was a working royal, before the acrimonious fall-out with his family.
When told he no longer qualified for its protection after leaving for America with wife Meghan Markle, his offer to pay for it was declined. It is that decision he decided to challenge in the courts, as he believed he should have been allowed to pay, in the same way football clubs do for officers to maintain order at matches.
But the Home Office, opposing Harry’s claim, said Ravec considered it was ‘not appropriate’ for wealthy people to ‘buy’ protective security, which might include armed officers, when it had decided that ‘the public interest does not warrant’ someone receiving such protection on a publicly funded basis.
The Duke of Sussex (pictured outside the Royal Courts of Justice in March) was seeking the go-ahead from the High Court to secure a judicial review over a decision that he should not be allowed to pay privately for his protective security
When told he no longer qualified for its protection after leaving for America with wife Meghan, his offer to pay for it was declined. (Pictured: Prince Harry and Meghan Markle with security in Rotorua, New Zealand, in 2018)
Lawyers for the Met Police, an interested party in the case, said Ravec had been ‘reasonable’ in finding ‘it is wrong for a policing body to place officers in harm’s way upon payment of a fee by a private individual’.
Mr Justice Chamberlain delivered his ruling shortly after 10am on Tuesday morning.
The court was told at the earlier hearing that Harry’s latest legal challenge was related to an earlier claim he brought against the Home Office after he was told he would no longer be given the ‘same degree’ of personal protective security when visiting the UK.
A full hearing in that challenge, which also focuses on Ravec’s decision-making and for which Harry was given the go-ahead last summer, is yet to be held.
Harry’s lawyers told the court earlier this month that the Home Office delegated an ‘issue of principle’ to Ravec over ‘whether an individual whose position had been determined by Ravec not to justify protective security should be permitted to receive protective security but to reimburse the public purse for the cost of that security provision’.
Ravec later concluded that ‘individuals should not be permitted to privately fund protective security’, the judge was told.
Tuesday’s ruling comes amid an ongoing High Court trial involving the duke, in which he is bringing a contested claim against Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN) over allegations of unlawful information gathering.
Harry is also waiting for rulings over whether similar cases against publishers Associated Newspapers Limited (ANL) and News Group Newspapers (NGN) can go ahead.
