Supreme Court: no-win no-fee costs regime compatible with Article 6

摘要

Why then was there such an apparent swing in the majority of the court from its initial thoughts last July? I think they now appreciated (doubtless with the assistance of all the interested parties) just how central uplift and ATE recovery was to the system as operated between 2000 and 2013, and hence the impossibility of making some minor tweak in order to mitigate the defendant speedway owners' bill. This leads on to the obvious counterfactual. What would have happened had some brave defendant had a go at the system in the early 2000s? It is tempting to say that that defendant might well have won, although it seems unlikely. The real problems only emerged some years into the operation of the system, when massive bills started landing on defendants' desks. It seems that most people would probably have analysed the problem as a weighing up of Article 6 rights on both claimants' and defendants' sides, with no obvious winner or loser, until the MGN case in Strasbourg got us all thinking back in 2011.