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The Ministry of Justice’s Consultation
This consultation is now closed. You can now read the UK Register of Expert Witnesses submission.
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(196kb)
On 20 August 2009, the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) published its Consultation Paper CP 18/09 – Legal Aid: Funding Reforms – that includes proposals on expert fees.
Scope of the consultation
For our purposes, this consultation is focusing on the fees of expert witnesses paid out of the Legal Aid fund in both the civil and criminal justice systems. It runs from 20 August 2009 until 12 November 2009.
Summary
The MoJ:
- accepts that quality expert evidence is essential to the effective running of the civil and criminal justice systems
- reports that many ‘providers’ (that’s probably MoJ-speak for lawyers) say selection of the right expert is critical to the outcome they can achieve for their clients
- recognises that the expert witness community is a broad and disparate body and encompasses a range of motivations for undertaking forensic work
- explains that the existing pressures that tend to restrict the supply of experts willing to undertake publicly funded work has pushed cost control behind more pressing concerns over quality and supply of experts.
But the MoJ says that the time has now come to start to implement cost controls in this difficult area. “As difficult as it appears to be, control in this area must begin to mirror the efforts that have been made to achieve value for money in all other areas of legal aid spend”.
The MoJ particularly notes that:
- fee rates differ between criminal and civil cases
- fee rates vary, for the same work, between experts
- disbursement spend (which includes expert fees) in public family law cases has risen by 46% in the last 4 years
- it plans to stop paying cancellation fees, to cap fees for travel time to £40/h and to cap mileage rates to 45p in civil legal aid contracts awarded from 2010.
The MoJ’s long-term aim is to reduce the spend on expert witness fees by 20% and to introduce fixed fees for experts undertaking publicly funded work. Its initial move in this direction is to cap expert witness fee rates, using the existing MoJ guidelines for determining officers as its baseline - notwithstanding that those guidelines are supposed to be updated annually but haven’t changed since 2003! The MoJ says: “Setting rates aims to increase transparency, ensure consistency and control the unsustainable rising costs of expert’s fees.”
To understand what the Consultation Paper is about, you can:
To respond, you can:
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