Portal to handle all cases worth up to £50,000
Ken Clarke has unveiled plans for a dramatic extension of the fast-track system for dealing with low value claims.
The justice secretary’s package for taking forward the government’s reform of civil litigation costs, announced today, includes a proposal that all claims worth up to £50,000 should go through the Ministry of Justice’s recently introduced electronic portal for handling low value claims.
The new ceiling exceeds the £25,000 cap proposed by Lord Young in his report ‘Common Sense, Common Safety’ last year.
Junior justice minister Jonathan Djanogoly said that extending the upper limit to £50,000 would capture 90% of all claims.
The Ministry of Justice has also proposed that the new limit should apply to all liabilities and not just road traffic cases.
The bulk of the measures in the package announced by Clarke take forward the Jackson review recommendations, which the government consulted on between November and February.
These include:
- an end to unsuccessful defendants being forced to pay claimant lawyers’ success fees and associated payments, including after the event insurance premiums
- allowing damages-based agreement – a form of ‘no win, no fee’ agreement under which lawyers are recompensed by taking a slice of their clients’ damages
- introducing a 10% increase in general damages
However in a concession to the claims lobby, the paper says the general ban on recovering after the expenses insurance premiums should not apply to sums paid for costly expert reports in clinical negligence cases.
Justifying this decision, the paper says: "These expert reports can be expensive and we need to provide a means of funding them to ensure that meritorious claims can be brought by those who cannot afford to pay for them.”
No comments yet