The new single County Court was introduced this week.
This could be a significant change to the way in which lower value civil claims are dealt with. Rather than there being individual local county courts, there will instead be a single County Court.
The individual local County Courts are instead now referred to as County Court Hearing Centres.
The idea of creating the single County Court is to remove procedural and jurisdictional issues which can cause complications. The Justice Minister Shailesh Vara, recently published an article in the Law Society Gazette stating that “it will also allow us to make improvements behind the scenes so our courts can run more efficiently and flexibly. For users, the most notable effect of all the changes will be that they can submit claims more easily and they will find that the whole system runs more smoothly”.
Whether it makes any difference at all remains to be seen. It is easy to give something a new name but will there be actually any major benefit? We will have two wait and see.
