It is a great pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Delyn (Mr Hanson) and my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill), the Chairman of the Justice Committee. The difficulty for me is that they have already covered all the issues I was going to cover, but let me touch on one highlighted by the right hon. Member for Delyn and the Chairman of the Committee: access to justice.
Access to justice has been the key issue for all of us throughout this process. It was a big issue for the Committee, but it is a big issue for the courts and the senior judiciary. Through an Industry and Parliament Trust Fellowship, I have had the opportunity to talk to members of the judiciary about many of these issues, and I can assure the House that they are very concerned about access to justice.
Without the information from the Ministry of Justice, it is difficult to know what the impact of the changes will be. An enormous number of reforms are taking place; it is not just court and tribunal fees that are being put through at a rapid pace by the MOJ. The Lord Chief Justice is a great reformer, and when talking to him one really gets the feeling that he understands the issues relating to access to justice. At the same time, Lord Justice Briggs is taking forward his views for an
online court, which could reduce the costs of justice by taking lawyers out of the equation in bringing a relatively small case to court. A lot of work needs to be done to get the detail of online courts right. Nevertheless, it will be there to provide access to justice.
The Committee’s report highlights the need to consider other means of determining court applications. One of those comes under the term “alternative dispute resolutions”. I happen to be the chairman of the all-party group on alternative dispute resolutions, so it is an area I am aware of. The courts, too, are aware of this. When I sat in the commercial courts, the judges were very keen to ensure that when there was an option of alternative dispute resolution, people took it. Some did and some did not, but it is important that it is offered as an alternative to their carrying on with their day in court. If they do take the option, it is important to ensure that the alternative dispute resolution sector can also keep costs down.
When I sat with judges in the courts, the issue on their minds all the time was how to keep costs down. We went through this with a lot of the cost hearings and cut out quite a lot of the barristers’ fees. It is important to ensure that we can tell whether it is the changes to the courts that are having the effect on tribunal numbers, or whether it is the effect of the fees being charged. I say that because as part of the experience I spent a day with an employment tribunal. There were three members sitting and I asked them how long it would go on for. They said that they had scheduled six days for an employment tribunal that could have lasted one day, so the court fees had not had a significant effect on this individual bringing their case. They had assigned six days to it, because it was a litigant in person and they wanted to bend over backwards to provide the time for that individual to make their case. A much more sensible approach would have been to ensure that the case went on for a lot less time, while still preserving access to justice and ensuring that the litigant in person could still achieve what they wanted to achieve.
The senior judiciary have been pursuing one line of cost reduction, while the Government have been pursuing another. There is nothing wrong with pursuing reductions along a twin track, provided that the two groups work together and talk to each other. The criticism that came back to me from the senior judiciary I sat with was that the Government were not talking to them about the changes they were making. That is a great shame, because without that I do not see how we can make sense of, and really get to the bottom of, access to justice.
My hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst, the Chair of the Committee, has already highlighted the issues around the impact assessment of the changes to court fees and the fact that the information is still not available. He also pointed out that the Master of the Rolls was absolutely scathing about the quality of that evidence. I put that on record again, because it is very important when someone as senior as the Master of the Rolls is critical of the Government’s approach. I have to say that I share his views. The courts and tribunal fee is not a milch cow; it is a real issue of access to justice. Without the information we still have not received, we cannot assess the impact of the fees on access to justice and what impact they will have.
5.59 pm