A major report by one of the UK’s leading experts on dispute resolution calls for ‘a new vision of the justice system’ arguing that it is “too complex and disjointed and does not deliver justice often enough or contribute to reducing the future incidence of problems”.
Resolving disputes: a framework for holistic reform, by Professor Christopher Hodges of the University of Oxford, proposes a roadmap for restructuring the fragmented justice landscape into a coherent public service. The review states that “it is time to reform the multiple different, and sometimes competing, bodies and pathways, integrating and simplifying the existing diversity and complexity to form a single justice system.”
Commissioned by the Nuffield Foundation as part of its Public right to justice programme, the review recommends:
- Creating a single justice system that brings together courts, tribunals, ombudsmen, regulators and advice services.
- Consolidating responsibility for overseeing the design, management and reform of the justice system, potentially through the creation of a new national Justice Institute.
- Replacing the existing eight frontline legal services regulators with a single independent regulator.
- Establishing simpler, joined-up pathways for resolving disputes, for example, by combining ACAS and employment tribunals.
The review highlights how people experiencing everyday legal problems relating to housing, employment, family relationships, debt, consumer purchases and public services, find that support and routes to redress that are spread across multiple organisations. The result is a system that can be difficult to navigate and one that too often responds to problems after they have escalated, rather than helping prevent them in the first place.
While also raising concerns about unmet legal need, court delays, disjointed routes to redress and ‘advice deserts’, the significance of the review lies less in its diagnosis of these problems and more in the scale and ambition of its proposals for systemic reform.
Report author Professor Hodges of the University of Oxford said: “The justice system has been designed in fragments. Courts, tribunals, ombudsmen, regulators and advice services have all developed separately, leaving people to struggle through a confusing landscape when they need help and redress after something has gone wrong.
“My report argues for a fundamentally different approach – the creation of a single, coherent system that helps people solve problems, secure redress and reduce future harm, not by simply improving existing institutions, but by connecting them into a single, effective system that actually works.”
Rob Street, Director of Justice at the Nuffield Foundation, said: “What makes this review distinctive is the scale of its ambition. Rather than proposing another round of specific reforms, Professor Hodges asks what a system for resolving disputes is for, and what would it look like if it were designed around people’s needs, rather than institutions. The result is a major challenge to longstanding assumptions about how best justice should be delivered.”
