The meat in the sandwich

Fixed fast-track costs were a basic tenet of the Woolf reforms but they were introduced for fast-track trials only. That is unsurprising. Lord Woolf’s Access to Justice report contained a suggested costs scale or matrix, taking into account the weight and complexity of the case and the stage it had reached, which was met with almost universal condemnation. Various pilot schemes threw out widely-differing results, serving only to highlight the difficulty in obtaining the necessary data and translating it into a regime of fixed costs for an as yet unknown practice and procedure. The lord chancellor therefore postponed the introduction of fixed fast-track pre-trial costs until the fast-track had been running long enough for the amount of work involved in it to be ascertained and evaluated.

It has now been running for 14 years. The certainty of fixed costs was at the heart of Lord Woolf’s proposals, although the costs must