Richard White was a civil servant in the Lord Chancellor’s Department who spanned the reigns of Hailsham, Havers and Mackay.

He was a bit eccentric, liked beagling and could be severely irascible.

But he was committed to access to justice, became a founding member of the Legal Action Group, and had a sharp intellect.

An academic before joining the department, he contributed to a pioneering study of access to legal advice in Birmingham.

The apex of his career as a civil servant was the final consultation paper of the Civil Justice Review.

It set out a sharp vision of a unified civil court, in which historical demarcations were swept away in the cause of improved access.

His successors, authors of the Ministry of Justice consultation Solving disputes in the county courts: creating a simpler, quicker and more proportionate system, might get out the old files.

They will appreciate just how far they have fallen.

There was, it is true, a fatal practical flaw underlying White’s proposals.

A unified civil court threatened differential rights of audience between barristers and solicitors.

The logic was all too obvious: one court, one lawyer.

The thunder of the judiciary and the lightning of the bar fell upon White’s clear vision.

Galileo-like, the review team was required to recant. It admitted its error: the world was, on reflection, flat.

As a result, outdated practices in the organisation of the courts slumbered on.

The Law Society expressed its ‘major disappointment‘. Yet, within two decades, solicitors had broken through into advocacy, albeit with the court structure largely unchanged.

The current consultation offers few chances for such heroic failure.

The last vestige of the Civil Justice Review’s original argument is a mild suggestion at the end that High Court judges might be more easily deployed in the county court.

There is also a proposal for an end to localism: a unified county court.

The shoddiness of the exercise can be seen from the statement of the principles on which it claims to operate.

These are ‘proportionality’, ‘personal responsibility’, ‘streamlined procedures’ and ‘transparency’.

Just compare these with the equivalent statement by Lord Woolf in a report which followed the Civil Justice Review.

His first criterion was that the civil justice system should be ‘just’ and his second that it would be ‘fair’.

On their own admission, the current authors give no weight to such considerations.

That is an error beyond the responsibility of a civil servant: it is a narrowness of conception for which a minister should be both responsible and ashamed.

The paper is, as you might expect, big on two subjects: more fees and getting rid of cases.

It proposes a major increase in the use of mandatory alternative dispute resolution.

Indeed, it effectively proposes the wholesale privatisation of small claims.

Parties in small claims cases, it suggests, should be automatically referred to mediation.

The current small claims mediation service could ‘work alongside private sector and even not-for-profit organisations’.

And then the sting: ‘Although there would be a fee for using the service, in the majority of cases that should be more than offset by savings that parties make from earlier settlement and the costs and fees associated with a small claims hearing.’

There are some problems with this.

Above all, it is not clear that the drafters of the paper know much about the small claims track in the county court.

The small claims procedure was originally set up precisely as an accessible, lawyer-free, consumer-friendly method of alternative dispute resolution forum to the court.

That is why there are no awards of costs.

The small claims procedure was a response to considerable pressure from organisations like the Consumers Association in the UK during the 1970s and was part of a worldwide movement to open up the courts to small consumer claims.

To propose compulsory external mediation is to ask for an alternative to an alternative.

What is more, it is not clear that the economics will stack up.

Mediation should undoubtedly be offered as an option but why should a litigant be deprived of the choice of going directly to a hearing?

And, if informal discussion is sabotaged by the unwarranted intransigence of one party, why should the other have to fork out for mediation costs as well as for the full hearing they should have had in the first place?

There is, of course, no mention in the consultation paper of the remission of fees.

If fees are to be massively expanded for small claims, then does there not have to be a rather more organised and generous scheme for their remission?

And, if mediation is to be privatised, who is intended to bear the costs of those entitled to remission: the court service or the other hapless litigants mandated into mediation?

What is more, how are judges to maintain any control of the standards of outhoused mediation?

To what extent will such mediation be conducted ‘in the shadow of the law’ or simply just represent what the parties will agree under threat of further costs?

This consultation paper will encounter no massive resistance from the big beasts of the legal world, as did Richard White’s trailblazing paper.

But that is the trouble. This is a timid, cost-saving measure, limited in focus and designed to take poor people out of the public court system.

How inconvenient they are.

How much easier if there was no public duty to serve them. O tempora, o mores.

Roger Smith is director of the law reform and human rights organisation Justice