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Quote: "Scep Tick12 September 2016 08:13 am

"The LSB says insufficient competition in the legal sector is restricting choice, increasing cost and hampering innovation in the sector."

Conveyancing is dirt-cheap. You can make a will for buttons. Crime is under legal aid. There is no problem with choice and competition in those areas.

Litigation is obviously a problem. And it always has been. That's nothing to do with competition and everything to do with it being time-consuming thanks to our laws. Nothing the LSB or anyone can do about that."

PI Litigation has never been an issue except for anyone other than insurers, and even then costs have traditionally been low.

Under the old regime, average costs were around £5K for a claim that went to Court and £2.5-3K for a claim settled outside. Hardly expensive when for eg. You've blinded someone or cut off someone's fingers or a hand at work, or caused them a year of pain through a genuine whiplash!

The trouble is in my opinion, the Insurers are backed by rich names who just want to make ever more profit on their investments. The Conservative Government have sympathy with making ever more profit. That's where the issue lies in my opinion.

Solicitor's costs don't make it impossible for the Client to claim when they're funded by Legal Aid or No Win no Fee. The issue is, the Insurers, don't want to pay out for negligent clients! It makes no difference to a Claimant Client whether the final bill is £5K or £500K if they're on Legal Aid or a CFA, so access to justice isn't a problem in PI, and never was.

If you want to talk about access to justice you only need look at the £900 tribunal fee placed on Employment Law Claims to dissuade people from claiming against employers!

There's also some loss of focus as to why PI exists. It's not simply to compensate the injured but also to punish the guilty financially and deter bad practices at work that lead to accidents. The latter has been negated somewhat by insurance, however policy excesses should achieve the same aim, although whether or not insurers apply them to workplace insurance, is another matter. It's remarkable though that after so many years, workplace accidents are still occurring so frequently with so many of them down to negligent practices / blatant breaches of the Law. Maybe the real answer here is to make employers liable in workplace accidents for a proportion of the costs so it hits them in the pocket directly, rather than cutting the fees of those helping injured individuals and helping to punish firms who flout H&S laws.

It's also worth commentating that on conveyancing, it never has been expensive even when it was around £1K. People quite happily pay £3K for an Estate Agency to advertise their property, so what's the issue with paying the same for conveyancing? Shouldn't conveyancing be on a percentage basis like Estate Agency fees eg 2% with a fixed minimum rate to protect Clients from firms not properly doing searches? Instead we actually have too much competition which leads firms to carry out conveyancing at ridiculous prices and skipping vital checks to do it. I sold a property recently, the Solicitor's fees were £545 with £200 cashback on completion! ie £345. Around 10% of the estate agency fee. (I have no evidence of checks being skipped in this instance, but I do know it happens with some firms).