High Court and Court of Appeal Civil Division (Fees)

Jonathan Djanogly Excerpts

Tuesday 15th November 2011 Written Statements

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Mr Jonathan Djanogly)]

I have published today a consultation paper detailing proposals to increase fees in the High Court and Court of Appeal Civil Division.

These two jurisdictions hear the most complex civil court cases, and are particularly resource-intensive to run. The fees structure does not currently reflect the cost of providing services in these courts, meaning that there is a significant gap between costs and fee income. We propose to make targeted changes to these structures, affecting around 30 fees, in order to align more closely costs and income. Taken together, the proposals would reduce the current taxpayer contribution to HMCTS by £12 million to £14 million.

The cost of running the civil and family courts is currently around £612 million a year. Of this amount, 80% is funded through court fees with the remaining 20%, around £121 million, funded by the taxpayer. The Government’s long-term aim is to reduce this taxpayer subsidy by ensuring that fee income covers 100% of the cost of providing civil court services, minus the income foregone to the remission system. This is a system of fee waivers and reductions which ensures that access to justice is preserved for the least well off; around 160,000 fee remissions are granted per year.

Reducing the taxpayer subsidy of the courts service will be achieved through a combination of cost reductions (for example, reform of the courts estate, changes to civil and family justice processes) and fee increases. This will offer a fairer system to the taxpayer by targeting their contribution where it is most needed, and will ensure that, as far as possible, users pay for the service they receive while access to justice is protected for the most vulnerable.

As the cost of running civil court services is projected to decrease due to planned efficiency savings taking effect, it would be premature to increase all civil court fees to cover costs in a single round and risk recovering more than the cost of running the service. Instead, we propose to make phased and measured increases to fees over the short to medium term in order to balance correctly cost reduction and fee increases. My Department has already taken several such steps:

September 2010—inflationary increases to fees paid in private family cases, which projected an increase in fee income of around £6 million per year.

April 2011—inflationary increases to most civil, family and non-contentious probate court fees since each fee’s last increase, which is projected to increase court fee income by around £21 million per year.

This consultation paper represents the next step in this strategy. The paper contains 17 proposals affecting just over 30 civil fees in the High Court and Court of Appeal Civil Division, focusing on areas where there is a noticeable gap between fees and the cost of providing services in particular cases. The proposals cover diverse areas of work in these jurisdictions; the most notable are:

introduction of higher bands of issue (entry) fees in the High Court. The current highest issue fee paid is £1,670, for money claims over £300,000. We propose to add further bands, meaning that the highest entry fee paid would be £10,000, for claims over £l billion;

introduction of time-related hearing fees in the High Court and Court of Appeal Civil Division to reflect the increased cost involved in providing longer trials. The current hearing fee in the High Court is £1,090; we propose to introduce banded fees based on the time a court hearing is projected to last. The highest proposed fee is £10,900, for a case which lasts over 10 days.

Making increases in this way will mean that those whose cases consume a greater resource in court will pay more proportionally for the cost of processing their case, while the remission system remains in place for those who cannot afford to pay fees.

It is available online at http://www.justice.gov.uk/consultations.