Claimants will no longer be forced to come to London to have administrative cases heard, under plans to improve access to justice due to be announced by the Ministry of Justice.

The Gazette has learned that four regional centres of the Administrative Court are to open in Cardiff, Birmingham, Manchester (pictured) and Leeds from 21 April 2009, with a further centre planned for Bristol in 2010.

The reform will allow regional high court sittings to take place regularly outside London to deal with work currently administered, heard and dealt with only at the Royal Courts of Justice.

The regional centres will use rooms in existing civil justice or combined courts, with two judges assigned to the new courts. Lord Justice Langstaff will be in charge in Leeds and Manchester, and Lord Justice Beatson in Birmingham and Cardiff. They will supervise and work alongside high court judges.

The idea came out of Lord Justice May’s Justice Outside London report published in 2007. Where a litigant has a connection with one of the regions, the matter will be dealt with there rather than in London.

The new centres will be computer-networked through COINS – a confidential secure system to enable them to act cohesively and on a par with London.

Rabinder Singh QC, outgoing chairman of the Constitutional and Administrative Law Bar Association, welcomed regionalisation as an ‘important contribution to access to justice’.

He said: ‘We need to ensure that people in the regions get the same high quality of service they would expect in London, so we need to get the infrastructure right, including the court’s technology; and retain the right of people to get access to the best legal representation irrespective of ability to pay.’