The Law Gazette
Lord Justice Jackson, the architect of the present civil costs regime, last night called for fixed costs to apply to all claims valued up to £250,000.
Jackson urged government ministers to make reform an immediate priority with a view to setting fixed recoverable costs by the end of this year.
Having carved out the costs reforms that formed part two of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012, Jackson said the time has now come to extend the fixed fees regime significantly. Current fixed costs apply only to personal injury claims valued up to £25,000, but Jackson recommended that every type of civil claim up to £250,000 should be subject to new restrictions.
In a speech in Westminster, he even went as far as to suggest a grid of rates – minus disbursements and VAT – for each value of claim: £18,750 for claims up to £50,000; £30,000 for claims up to £100,000; £47,500 for claims up to £175,000, and £70,250 for claims up to £250,000.
However Jackson advised the government to pause plans for fixed fees for clinical negligence claims to stop the ‘Balkanisation’ of fees for different types of claim.
‘What we do not want to have is a series of separate grids for different types of cases,’ he said. ‘There should be a single fixed costs grid for all multi-track cases up to £250,000.’
The judge baulked at applying fixed costs to claims valued over £250,000, saying that ‘would be too great a change for the profession to accept’, though he suggested a universal costs regime could be implemented once people see how it works.
Jackson acknowledged that his recommendations may not be welcomed by solicitors on both the claimant and defendant sides, but he said the reform would save on the pressures of costs management and help solicitors to explain to clients how costs have been accrued.
He also said practitioners’ experience of fixed fees in low-value claims – as well as in the IP Enterprise Court – has been ‘satisfactory’.
‘My impression is that the profession is now more willing to accept fixed costs than it was in the past,’ he said. ‘I do accept if we have a regime of fixed costs there will be winners and losers – it is impossible a case will cost the client precisely the amount set out in the grid.
‘That is a price worth paying in order to obtain the benefits of certainty, predictability and proportionality – I have come across cases which have flown out of control where the issue is of modest value.’
