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It would be nice to think that the new government (of whatever hue that 'May' be) would also scrap the iniquitous 'stealth' civil litigation 'tax' of 5% on the issue of a claim form, which was introduced in March 2015 under the label "enhanced fees" (someone in the Ministry of (In)Justice must have a wicked sense of humour). The justification given is that the justice system must pay for itself as far as possible, but that is disingenuous in that the CIVIL justice system makes an annual profit of many millions of pounds. In charging their fees, the MOJ is taxing civil litigants in order to pay for the criminal and family justice systems, which should be funded by the nation as a whole. It gets worse in that, whilst the 'death tax' was to be tapered, so that larger estates paid more, the 'civil litigation tax' is tapered in the reverse direction: the fee is capped at £10,000, so that those with claims above £250,000 pay an ever decreasing % of the amount claimed. The obvious effect is to protect large corporates such as banks and insurers and to disadvantage claimants of ordinary means: on the one hand, claimants for modest amounts are discouraged or prevented from suing the corporates, whilst on the other, large corporate claimants are not discouraged from using the English courts.

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