Community legal service funding

Whether someone would suffer financial hardship if their costs were not reimbursed by the losing party was a question of fact and degree. There was no absolute standard by which that could be judged, nor that whether someone had suffered or would suffer financial hardship should be gauged against the criteria laid down for determining whether a person was eligible for public funding in order to bring a claim. If there was to be an absolute standard, it was reasonable to ask what it was.

If Parliament had intended there to be one, or had wished to provide specific criteria against which financial hardship should be judged (whether absolute or otherwise) then it would and could have so provided in the Community Legal Service (Cost Protection) Regulations 2000, SI 2000/824. There had been a deliberate and significant relaxation of the formerly stringent test by the removal of the word “severe”.

There was an obvious difficulty in