The County Court system is in desperate need of funding and improvement to prevent the already existing delays from getting longer. Substantial investment is needed by the government into repairing or building new courtrooms, replacing old IT systems and ensuring that waiting times for enquiries by solicitors and litigants in person are reduced.
On 21 January 2025, the Justice Committee reopened its inquiry into the work of the County Court. The original inquiry was opened in October 2023 and received both written submissions and oral submissions up to the end of May 2024. This original inquiry was opened due to the significantly long waiting times for cases to reach trial. Many written submissions were made to the committee for what could be improved, which we summarised in a previous article.
Following the dissolution of Parliament on 30 May 2024 prior to the general election on 7 July 2024, all select committees work stopped, meaning progress was not made in the inquiry.
However, the new chair of the Justice Committee, Labour MP Andy Slaughter, has now revived the previous committee’s inquiry, inviting written submissions until 13 February 2025.
The call for written submissions focuses on the same subjects as the previous inquiry, a list of which can be found here. Once written submissions have been received, the inquiry is likely to invite oral submissions before publishing any report and recommendations.
Any report is unlikely to be published before the summer.
The revived inquiry comes off the back of the latest set of Civil Justice Statistics which were published in December 2024, and which showed a continuation in the pattern of the number of county court claims being issued each quarter continuing to rise. They are now at their highest level since March 2020, meaning the courts are now back to the volume of claims which existed pre-Covid.
In the period July to September 2024, around 460,000 claims were issued in the county courts. Money and damages claims made up 89% of these.
One of the main focuses for the inquiry may be to examine whether any changes can be made to the small claims process within the County Court.
The following table shows the value of all money claims issues in the County Court in the period July to September 2024 and shows a disproportionate number of these claims (96.4%) are for less than £10,000 (the present small claims track limit):
| Value of claim | Number | Percentage of all money claims issued | Running percentage total |
| Less than £300 | 112,975 | 29.5% | 29.5% |
| More than £300 but less than £500 | 45,531 | 11.9% | 41.4% |
| More than £500 but less than £1,000 | 64,101 | 16.7% | 58.1% |
| More than £1,000 but less than £1,500 | 37,943 | 9.9% | 68.0% |
| More than £1,500 but less than £3,000 | 52,996 | 13.8% | 81.8% |
| More than £3,000 but less than £5,000 | 30,822 | 8.0% | 89.8% |
| More than £5,000 but less than £10,000 | 25,117 | 6.6% | 96.4% |
| More than £10,000 but less than £100,000 | 13,311 | 3.5% | 99.9% |
| More than £100,000 | 367 | 0.1% | 100% |
| TOTALS | 383,163 | 100% |
Some contributors to the earlier inquiry suggested that one of the main problems in increased county court claims was due to the increase in private parking claims. One contributor suggested that private parking companies (and their solicitors) are issuing between 400,000 and 500,000 county court claims each year.
It is clear that these types of claims are substantial in number and make up a significant percentage of all issued money claims in the county court each year. The contributors previously suggested that these types of claims should be removed from the county court process to a specialised tribunal with its own set of rules about the work that needs to be carried out before such claims are issued, in the same way that statutory parking cases were removed from the magistrates court to a specialised tribunal. This would then free up valuable time for the courts to deal with other matters.
We will wait to see whether any other contributors to the inquiry raise similar concerns or indeed whether the Justice Committee will take into account the comments from the previous contributors when they publish their report and any recommendations.
By the time the Justice Committee provides its report, the government may have been able to release figures in relation to the mediation of small claims cases, which became mandatory from May 2024. At present, we do not have any figures to identify whether the introduction of small claims mediation has led to the earlier settlement of claims.
The last published figures showed that the amount of time from issue of proceedings to trial was continuing to increase with a small claims matter taking just under a year from issue to trial. Hopefully the introduction of mandatory small claims mediation will see these figures start to decrease.