25 August 2026
Expanding the Social Relief of Distress grant could cost up to R139-billion a year, the National Treasury told the Supreme Court of Appeal on Tuesday. Graphic: Lisa Nelson
The government has warned that expanding the Social Relief of Distress (SRD) grant as ordered by the high court could cost the state up to R139-billion a year.
On Tuesday, the Department of Social Development (DSD), SASSA and National Treasury defended the grant’s regulations before the Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA).
The appeal was against a January 2025 Gauteng High Court judgment by Judge Leonard Twala, which found several regulations governing the R370-a-month grant unconstitutional and invalid.
The Institute for Economic Justice (IEJ) and #PayTheGrants had challenged the regulations, arguing they excluded millions of potentially eligible people.
Twala ruled in their favour. He found there was no reasonable justification for requiring vulnerable people to apply only online, and ordered the government to allow in-person applications.
He also ordered government to progressively increase the grant and raise the income threshold in line with the cost of living, and ruled that once-off payments and gifts should not be counted as income.
The SRD grant was introduced in 2020 as a temporary measure during the covid pandemic and has since been extended annually.
The SCA heard on Tuesday that the grant is paid to about 8.5-million people who meet the eligibility requirements, including an income threshold of R624 a month. SASSA conducts monthly checks of applicants’ bank accounts to determine whether they remain eligible.
Advocate Gilbert Marcus, for the National Treasury, told the SCA that the case involved a fundamental disagreement over how socio-economic rights “should be realised”.
“On the one hand, there is the laudable desire, shared by Treasury, to widen the net of social assistance as much as possible,” Marcus said.
But Treasury could not afford to do more, given competing demands on government and the country’s weak fiscal position, he said.
He argued that the high court had failed to properly assess Treasury’s evidence about those constraints. In directing the government how to spend its money, the high court had not sufficiently considered the separation of powers, Marcus argued.
“Government can only spend money it extracts through taxation. Borrowing money is nothing more than deferred taxation,” Marcus said.
He said further spending on the SRD would necessarily come at the expense of other government priorities.
Treasury’s longer-term strategy was to promote economic growth and job creation while providing social assistance as a safety net, Marcus said.
He said the relief sought by the IEJ could cost between R93-billion to R139-billion, depending on the extent to which the grant value and income threshold were increased.
Marcus defended the use of bank and database checks to determine whether applicants had “insufficient means” and prevent fraud and wasteful expenditure.
“It is not in dispute that in any reasonable system where public money is used to provide benefits to the population, procedural safeguards are adopted to ensure that only those to whom a particular benefit is due may receive it,” he said.
He acknowledged that no system is perfect, especially one dealing with millions of applications, but said, “some compromises have to be made”.
The judges repeatedly questioned whether those compromises unfairly affected vulnerable applicants.
On the online-only system, Judge Pieter Meyer referred to people “without the means to even buy a cellphone” and those unable to use electronic platforms, asking why they could not instead be assisted at SASSA offices.
Judge Wendy Hughes questioned what had changed since the covid lockdown, when online applications were introduced, and asked whether government had done enough to accommodate people without access to the system.
Marcus said government had introduced self-help kiosks at SASSA offices, email assistance and community outreach programmes. Call centres were also available to assist.
Advocate Herman van Eeden, for the DSD and SASSA, said the system remained online because it was the only practical way of processing applications on the scale required.
He said there were about 15-million people on the SRD grant system (not all of whom are considered eligible for the grant), and replacing the automated process with one requiring human intervention would lead to “administrative paralysis”.
Van Eeden also defended the monthly bank and database checks, saying the SRD was temporary relief awarded on a month-to-month basis and therefore required a “speedy verification process”.
He acknowledged that applicants could be wrongly excluded when databases contained outdated information, but said applicants could appeal and have their information corrected.
For the Socio-Economic Rights Institute (SERI), representing the IEJ and #PayTheGrants, advocate Jason Brickhill argued that the government’s case was not supported by the evidence it presented before the high court.
He referred to DSD proposals from 2023, showing that the department had considered increasing the grant to between R430 and R663 and raising the income threshold to R663, R945 or R1,417. Treasury had modelled the costs of these options.
Brickhill argued that Treasury had placed the maximum possible costs of expanding the grant before the SCA, without putting those figures into the broader context of the social assistance budget.
He said the R20-a-month grant increase in 2024 would have cost about R2-billion for 8.5-million beneficiaries, less than 1% of the roughly R250-billion social assistance budget at the time.
“The central part of this case is that grant beneficiaries seek incremental increases of that sort of proportion closer to inflation,” he said.
Brickhill also rejected the suggestion that allowing in-person applications would require SASSA to abandon its online system.
“These orders only apply to new applicants,” he said. Existing beneficiaries would continue receiving the grant unless they became ineligible.
“The order gives an additional option for that minority of people who can’t apply online to do so in person.”
Brickhill said SASSA’s interpretation of income effectively treated any money held by an applicant as income or financial support, regardless of where it came from or why it was in the person’s account.
Brickhill also challenged the government’s affordability argument. “Budget and affordability can never justify arbitrary exclusions,” he said.
He argued that, if government wanted to control beneficiary numbers because of budget constraints, it should do so transparently. This could be done by changing the eligibility criteria, rather than by creating barriers that prevent people from applying or relying on database systems that exclude people.
The SCA reserved judgment.
