APIL president Neil McKinley said:

“The Government has decided to go ahead with plans to force ‘simpler’ cases valued between £25,000 and £100,000 into a fixed costs regime, because doing so would avoid the complexity and implementation costs of a more tailored approach. This misses the point that most personal injury cases really are complex and cannot simply be shoe-horned into a simpler system with which they are just not compatible. Employers’ liability disease claims, for example, can be incredibly complex, as can product liability claims, yet both categories of claim are to be included in this new system.

"The Ministry of Justice has also provided little detail about how this will work, leaving it to ‘the parties and judges’ to work that out. That will take time and, until we get clarity on these matters, injured people will be subjected to a great deal of uncertainty at a time when they are very vulnerable.”