The prospect of waiting well over a year to hear your case in court is a hammer blow for civil justice, and the latest figures, which show delays of just under a year for small claims cases and nearly 18 months for multi/fast track cases, is unacceptable. That is the verdict from the Association of Consumer Support Organisations (ACSO) which represents companies that look after consumers making a claim.
The latest Civil Justice Quarterly figures were published by the Ministry of Justice on 2nd December, and the continuing delays in cases coming to court has led to calls for ministers to make reducing the time people have to wait to go to court more of a priority.
The report shows that the current delays are around three months longer than the equivalent period in 2019, meaning ministers cannot simply blame the pandemic. The figures underline that court delays had already reached a tipping point before Covid.
Looking closer at this quarter's data, waiting times are far from improving. Indeed, this quarter has seen the lowest number of claims go to trial so far this year.
Being the only quarter this year without official government-set Covid-19 controls, the delays cannot be be blamed on restrictions. Similarly, small claims cases have seen the longest waiting times outside of a nationwide lockdown.
Finally, for fast and multitrack trials, the average time between issue and trial is set to see its biggest annual increase in over a decade, with an average waiting time of over 70 weeks.
ACSO urges the Justice Secretary to give urgent attention to reducing court delays, not least because most people who go to law use the civil courts and it is not right that they are currently being denied access to justice.
Technology, in the form of alternative dispute resolution (ADR) and other forms of mediation, clearly has a role to play, and following early testing of ADR, the evidence is that it settles cases satisfactorily in days rather than months.
With this in mind, ACSO calls on ministers to speed up their current investigation into dispute resolution and give the public some confidence that the government is taking the long running scandal of civil court delays more seriously.