Following a damning report by the Citizens Advice Bureau, Jeff Zindani says the chaotic personal injury market needs to get its house in order

The conditional fee agreement (CFA) debacle continues with still no real resolution to the satellite, if not twilight world, of tortuous technical challenges by the insurance industry. The latest bête noire from defendants being the failure to specify what percentage the delay or subsidy factor has on the success fee, vitiating the whole CFA and with it the claimant's solicitor's costs.


When you have the Citizens Advice Bureau producing a carefully worded report stating that access to justice for personal injury victims is a sham because claimants, particularly the poor, have been short-changed by claims companies and confused by documentation, you know it is time to sit up and listen.


Released in December last year, the report reveals that volunteers have had to deal with more than 130,000 queries regarding CFAs since legal aid was abolished in 2000. Many of these enquiries, not surprisingly, relate to the sheer complexity of the system.


Access to justice should surely come in a much simpler form and this is not what Clement Atlee's Labour government could have envisioned 60 years ago.


Yet, at the same time, the current government is seriously considering increasing the small- claims limit for personal injury cases. No wonder some insurance companies maintain this a good thing - no need to deal with those awkward lawyers anymore, and like some relief organisation they can now make payments to those who have 'merit' and who are in 'need'.


Just imagine injured workers trying to obtain compensation from their employers but not understanding simple health and safety regulations or self-explanatory concepts such as reasonable practicability and contributory negligence.


When you hear that one of the main priorities of the Association of Personal Injury Lawyers for the coming year is to promote the use of rehabilitation in personal injury cases, you wonder whether those solicitors' firms across the UK that have closed or are in a serious financial state because of the turbulent events of the past few years, will be queuing to enrol on training courses designed to improve their knowledge base. The use of rehabilitation is a good thing, but for it to work, the market-place needs to be rehabilitated first.


The final nail in the coffin could be Sir David Clementi's recommendation that ownership and control of law firms should be opened to external non-lawyer parties. There may be those who feel that this may not be a bad thing because consumers have had a raw deal from an out-of-date legal profession. Not that an independent legal profession is vital to a modern democracy. Who cares about challenging government and big business and trying to make them accountable through our tort system?


Perhaps in the future supermarket-based and motoring organisations will be the people's champions and not the traditional gatekeepers of workers' and consumers' rights, such as trade unions and affinity groups.


The personal injury market has seen several well-intentioned reforms over the past few years, but it has been left in a chaotic state, with funding anomalies creating access to injustice for many victims; further reforms could create even more havoc. The sad thing is that we are talking about our civil justice system.


Jeff Zindani is a solicitor and managing director of Solihull-based Forum Law