Neil Hickman casts his eye over the new Civil Proceedings Fees Order


Some of the Civil Proceedings Fees (Amendment) (No 2) Order 2007 (SI 2007/2176) - to give its full, snappy title - is the usual gentle cranking upwards in obedience to the Treasury mantra of full cost recovery.



Don't worry, I am not going to bore you with the usual unavailing arguments about that one. Neither am I going to set out the details of what it will now cost you to issue a claim, the fees for which appear in three tables covering a full page of A4. As you would expect, the bigger the claim, the bigger the fee (maximum £1,530), and it will cost you a bit less to issue via Money Claim Online and a bit less again to issue in the Claim Production Centre. As you would not expect, the fees for issuing a claim have actually gone down a little - the maximum used to be £1,700 and the smaller issue fees have gone down too.



Issue your possession claim over the counter in the county court and it will cost £150. Use Possession Claims Online and the fee drops to a much more user-friendly £100.



Allocation fees have undergone a huge change. Small claims over £1,500 now get charged only £35 instead of £100; get into fast-track or multi-track territory and you will have to fork out £200. You are supposed to get charged that if the rules or a practice direction provide that the rules on allocation do not apply. Is this going to mean the Revenue getting stung for £200 as their cases are listed for disposal? I only ask.



You then find the listing fee, Fee 2.2, is a manageable £100, and not payable in the small-claims track. Oh good...



Then it gets nasty. Fee 2.3 is the hearing fee. That gets charged in every case. In the small-claims track it ranges from £25 for a claim of £300 or less, to £300 where the claim exceeds £3,000 but does not exceed £5,000. If the hearing fee is not paid, even in the small-claims track, unless orders and strike-outs will be the order of the day. However, there is the possibility (quite conceivable with articulate litigants in person) that a case involving more than £5,000 might be allocated to the small-claims track by agreement. Should that happen, the rules fail to make any hearing fee payable.



If the case is in the fast-track, the fee is £500; the multi-track will cost you £1,000.



Do you get the fee back if you settle? Yes, but - and the small-claims track 'buts' are different from those applying elsewhere. In the small-claims track, if the court receives notice in writing from the person who paid the fee at least seven days before the date set for the hearing that the case has settled or discontinued, the hearing fee is refunded in full. Miss the deadline - and do remember that 'seven days before' a hearing on Friday is actually the preceding Thursday (rule 2.8 of the Civil Procedure Rules (CPR)) - or try and do it by telephone and you lose your refund.



In the fast- and multi-tracks, there is a sliding scale. Once again, notice needs to be given in writing by the person who paid the listing fee. More than 28 days before the hearing, you get the whole of the fee back. Between 14 and 28 days, you get 75% of it. Between seven and 14 days will see you receiving only half of the fee, and less than seven days' notice means no refund at all. In the multi-track, where you might only be arguing about £15,001, the hearing fee is a lot of money to be throwing away.



You will not, of course, take any notice of me, but can I remind you that you can avoid that particularly irritating fee charged just for asking the court to adjourn a hearing (which now goes up to £40 by consent, £75 on notice) by making the application by consent at least 14 days before the hearing. If you are acting for a mortgage lender and you are asking the court to take a case out of the possession block list due to be held in a month's time because your proceedings have successfully woken the borrower up, why not get the borrower to countersign the letter to the court? You may think the £40 would be better used in paying your client's loan.



The copying fees charged by the court, which used to be a cool £1 for the first page and 10p a page thereafter, are now an eye-watering £5 for ten pages or less and 50p a page thereafter. Toner is expensive stuff, evidently. Copies on computer disk used to be £3 and are now £5. (I am, by the way, still wondering what would have been a convincing answer, as opposed to the answer I gave, to the litigant in person I encountered last year who demanded about £1,300 from his opponent in copying charges on disclosure in a building dispute, and indignantly pointed out that the rules made it clear that £1 a document and £3 a copy on disk was reasonable.)



Assessing costs is, as we all know, an expensive business. It has just got a great deal more expensive. The fee for a detailed assessment has gone up from a flat £300 (£600 in the High Court) to anything from £300 to £5,000 depending on the amount of the bill. But at least they leave VAT and disbursements out of account in assessing the fee.



Finally, schedule 1A of the order sets out in some detail the procedure for fee remission, which court staff will be expected to operate. It includes one quite understandable provision which is, however, a Human Rights Act challenge waiting to happen. If a restraint order (either against a vexatious litigant under section 42(1A) of the Supreme Court Act 1981 or under CPR 3.11) is in force, the fee payable on an application for leave to issue or take a step in proceedings, or to appeal against or seek to discharge the order, must be paid in full. Remission is only granted retrospectively if the leave is granted. While vexatious litigants are tiresome, they are generally impecunious as well, and this might be thought to amount to a denial of access to the courts.



District Judge Neil Hickman sits at Milton Keynes County Court and is joint general editor of Jordans' Civil Court Service