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Perhaps part of the reason that the costs of litigation are so high is that the Wolfe Reforms of 1998 have completely failed; worse that that they have led to procedure becoming more complex.
The rues are constantly tinkered with, except in the area of costs, where they are wholly rewritten with monotonous regularity, and have become greatly more complex than they were before the changes were introduced.
The whole cost budgeting idea simply adds to costs.
No one can have seriously though that spending time filling out the form, reading in detail the opponents form, and then attending a CMC to spend a couple of hours in front of a judge arguing the minutiae of one another's costs budgets was going to do anything other than increase the overall spend.
As John Bower notes, costs once fixed, fail to increase, even though the court fees increase at a speed faster than inflation, and are now a substantial disincentive to claimants to issue.