Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12 Page 13 Page 14 Page 15 Page 16 Page 17 Page 18 Page 19 Page 20 Page 21 Page 22 Page 23 Page 24 Page 25 Page 26 Page 27 Page 28 Page 29 Page 30 Page 31October 2016 LocalGovernmentLawyer 6 to receive support. The key question is whether this has had the knock-on effect of raising the costs of local authorities and other public bodies. More than three quarters (78%) of respondents say their teams do now deal more frequently with LiPS on the other side. One respondent reports that this has led to “an increase in cases which are contended, albeit on erroneous grounds as litigants in person do not access or cannot access legal advice, as well as increased time and cost in terms of longer court hearings because they take longer time than most legally qualified advocates in presenting / dealing in court.” There is no process, another respondent says, adding: “LiPs either have no idea of the rules or no intention of even attempting to comply and then expect that the court will hear them, in full and at length when we have little or no idea of their case.” This experience mirrors the comments of other respondents: “LiPs are a lot more time-consuming for case- handlers: hearings are longer, there is a refusal to focus on / understand the legal issues, overcomplicating the hearing and making it more stressful for witnesses, who receive a lot more abuse when litigants do not get their own way.” The courts tending to give LiPs the benefit of the doubt over the local authority is another familiar refrain, with one respondent saying judges “bend over backwards for litigants in person – LiPS get away with a lot more than solicitors do”. Cost recovery is also seen as problematic. The (not so) great reformers? In recent years both the Government and the judiciary have attempted in various ways to reform the system for dealing with disputes in England and Wales. The Jackson reforms were intended to bring civil legal costs under control but respondents report only a mixed effect. “Fewer firms are issuing personal injury claims,” notes one respondent. “However, where One-Way-Qualified-Costs-Shifting applies, there is no incentive on the claimant to discontinue, even where clear that they have a hopeless case.” Another suggests that “cases with a slim chance of success will increase as claimant lawyers will use less experienced staff to try to maintain fee income level. Hearings will take a lot longer.” The Court of Appeal ruling in Mitchell has, however, been welcomed as having had “a positive effect on procedural compliance”. Ministers have meanwhile brought in a number of reforms to judicial review in recent years, with the express intention of ensuring that weak or hopeless claims are filtered out at an early stage. Indeed, the former Prime Minister David Cameron vowed in one speech early in his tenure to tackle what he considered to be the “time wasting” such challenges involved. These reforms have included higher court fees, stricter time limits (for procurement and planning challenges) and requiring judges (when granting relief) to consider the likelihood of a substantially different outcome. The Ministry of Justice is now consulting on a requirement for claimants to disclose to defendants the identity of those who are providing financial backing above a certain threshold for the claim – a proposal recently described by the Civil Justice Council as “a fundamentally unprincipled breach of the principle of equality of arms”. However, as we have already seen, many respondents believe the number of judicial review challenges is likely to rise, not fall; the continued pressure to cut or restructure services and the advent of crowd funding (see p15), which is particularly apt for these kinds of disputes, are among the factors that militate against that. “We seem to live in a JR bubble where people are not put off from litigating against their council,” says one lawyer. Adds another: “I foresee a greater amount of claims simply due to the greater duties placed on local authorities and yet with diminishing in-house legal staff, the legal service of the future is much more likely to be reactive as an arms-length organisation rather than reactive as an in house team.” But there is optimism in some quarters that the changes do add to the legal team’s armoury. “There is the potential for an increase in the number of [judicial review] claims,” suggests one respondent, “but, hopefully, in many of those cases the Court will be of the view, once it has seen the local authority’s detailed (time and cost heavy) acknowledgement of service, that it would be ‘highly’ likely the decision complained of would not be different if the conduct of the local authority had not occurred.” Fig 2