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Jackson's reforms on fixed costs up to £25K, one way costs shifting seemed fair enough (although detrimental to me financially).

However, bag of a fag packet fixed costs figures for higher value cases represents the pendulum swinging too far the other way and seriously reduces access to justice.

Costs budgeting had admirable aims but was very badly executed. It leads to a pointless additional layer of costs and results in reasonable and proportionate costs being disallowed and unreasonable costs being allowed because costs budgets are set on an arbitrary basis with very little thought in many cases. A recent great idea is not to record assumptions in low value cases so no one knows the basis on which the budget was set and whether it would be reasonable to deviate from it.

Costs budgets have to be incorporated in the present bill of costs format which equates to a tenfold increase in the number of parts in a bill of costs making it impenetrable to read and impossible to assess the reasonableness of otherwise of costs. It simply obfuscates the level of costs being claimed when it should surely be assisting the costs judge.

The proposed j-code bill of costs just increases the problem. It may accurately set out the costs recorded but it is used for the inter partes assessment of costs. The whole point of such a bill is to allow a the parties and a judge to decide if costs are reasonable or not. The j-code bill is pretty impenetrable and impossible for even for someone familiar with 107 codes to works if costs were reasonably incurred or not when assessing it. It may save a costs draftsman the job of drawing a bill of costs but the upshot it that the bill of costs it produces is not fit for purpose.

The real problem with J-codes is that Hutton et al were forced to
use the useless costs budgeting format. It should have just used the old bill format albeit with documents split into a more logical format.