The government has confirmed its intention to fully integrate mediation into the court process for civil claims valued up to £10,000 (Increasing the use of mediation in the civil justice system: government response to consultation, CP 897, Ministry of Justice (MoJ), July 2023). These proposals build on the government’s ambitions to increase the use of dispute resolution across the civil and family courts and tribunals as set out in the Call for evidence on dispute resolution in England and Wales in 2021.1The consultation ran from 3 August to 31 October 2021, with a summary of responses published in March 2022.

The government’s response, published on 25 July 2023, followed a consultation that ran from 26 July to 4 October 2022 and received just 134 responses (26 per cent from the dispute resolution/mediation profession and 12 per cent from the public). Mediation will now become an essential step in civil proceedings for ‘lower value’ civil claims.

In his foreword to the response document, Lord Bellamy KC, a parliamentary under secretary of state at the MoJ, states: ‘These reforms are not about restricting people’s access to the courts, but about expanding their avenues to redress.’ This seems hard to digest when the proposals for reform are to remove the right to a hearing for most civil claims under £10,000 and not for ‘higher value’ claims.

Integrated mediation will apply to all small claims in the county court (generally, those valued under £10,000) issued under the standard procedure in Part 7 of the Civil Procedure Rules 1998. This will include housing conditions and personal injury claims allocated to the small claims track but will not apply to claims issued under non-standard procedures, such as possession claims, which are issued under the Part 55 procedure.

It feels very much like this reform will drive the civil justice system further along the road to inequality; those with means get a judge and a hearing, but those without, do not. It is the wrong way round.

Very few seem to have noticed the reform announcement – and it has not been very prominent – but Simon Mullings, housing team leader at Hammersmith and Fulham Law Centre, tweeted in response: ‘They are only low value if you already have money.’ He makes a good point.