The ‘additional amount’: an all-or-nothing affair?

• Policy rationale: consequences of Pt 36, the Woolf Reforms and Sir Rupert Jackson review.
• CPR 36 and the ‘additional amount’.
• Divergent approaches: White and JLE.
• The way forward: promoting and encouraging the making of Pt 36 offers.

The fundamental policy rationale that underpins Pt 36 is to encourage litigating parties to make formal offers to settle their disputes which, if successful, will save the parties from continuing to incur their own costs and time in pursuing litigation and will preserve the court’s finite resources. As an important incentive to encourage both claimants and defendants to make Pt 36 offers, the Woolf Reforms introduced serious and severe cost consequences for those parties who refused to accept a Pt 36 offer and failed to do better at trial. Those cost consequences were further reinforced and expanded following Sir Rupert Jackson’s review of civil litigation costs following a concern that a claimant was insufficiently