The government will attempt to overturn the judgment of a multimillion-pound case affecting almost a quarter of a million unemployed people on Monday.

In what has come to be known as the Poundland case, the Department for Work and Pensions will argue that the supreme court should overturn the unanimous verdict of three appeal court judges this year that almost all of the coalition government's employment schemes were operating unlawfully.

In mid-February the appeal judges opened the way for an estimated £130m repayment to around 230,000 sanctioned jobseekers after declaring that a lack of official information and parliamentary notice had voided the legality of half a dozen schemes that forced the unemployed to work for up 780 hours without pay.

Lawyers acting for 25-year-old Cait Reilly, who was made to work in Poundland for three weeks unpaid, and unemployed lorry driver Jamieson Wilson, who refused to work for free for six months, argue that the supreme court hearing has become academic after the government, acting in concert with opposition Labour MPs, passed emergency retrospective legislation.

The jobseekers (back to work schemes) bill was rushed through parliament in just three days in March with the explicit intent of overturning the appeal court's ruling and to "protect the national economy" from the multimillion-pound rebate to the unemployed. At the time the DWP said the bill would ensure the department "won't be paying back money to people who didn't do enough to find work".

The law firm Public Interest Lawyers has since initiated a second court action to judicially review the retrospective law, saying it undermines its clients' right to justice and represents a clear violation of article 6 of the European convention on human rights.

Monday's supreme court hearing, which is listed for one day, will be argued by the government's top lawyer who will say that the secretary of state for work and pensions, Iain Duncan Smith, is entitled to a wide latitude of powers to devise employment schemes and has never needed to report the details of each scheme to parliament in the form of new regulations.

In a skeleton argument to the court, the government states: "It cannot have been the intention of parliament … that each and every scheme formulated with each employer would have to be the subject of separate regulations. That would have the effect of stultifying attempts to operate a range of schemes to meet particular needs."

The court is expected to deliver a verdict on the case in the autumn.