Page 78 - Solving Housing Disputes

Protocol for Low Value Personal Injury Claims in Road Traffic Accidents 205
206
mandates the use of a secure online portal to exchange information and
evidence at the pre-action stage for road traffic accident claims worth up to
£25,000. If the defendant accepts responsibility following a Stage 1 claim and
207
exchange, a dispute proceeds to Stage 2, where a claimant sends medical
evidence to the defendant and the parties have a time limit to negotiate
208
settlement. While we accept this method is constrained to financial disputes,
it is demonstrative of how joined up thinking by a sector can promote early
resolution of disputes.

3.42 ADR at the pre-action stage in housing disputes needs to be widely available and
known about for there to be uptake. The Civil Justice Council has identified lack
of knowledge about ADR as an issue and recommended the establishment of an
209
ADR website. We support this and see the potential for development of a
portal or landing page that offers subject-specific and accredited ADR
210
providers. Users might be able to input postcode data to link them to their
nearest face-to-face mediation provider and the website could be linked to from
211
pre-action protocols. However such an approach might require the system to

205 Available at https://www.justice.gov.uk/courts/procedure-rules/civil/protocol/pre-action-protocol-
for-low-value-personal-injury-claims-in-road-traffic-accidents-31-july-2013

206 Available at www.claimsportal.org.uk/

207 If the claim is contested at Stage 1, the case exists the portal and proceeds to court in accordance with
the Personal Injury Protocol, Hodges, note 157, p. 259.

208 Ibid, 259-260. From commencement in April 2010 to the last available statistics in January 2020, the
portal had received 7,408,962 claims and 1,933,991 claims had settled through the process https://www
.claimsportal.org.uk/about/executive-dashboard/

209 The Civil Justice Council has recommended the establishment of a new mediation/ADR website called
“alternatives”, which would describe the various forms of ADR available, illustrate each by video and
indicate how quality guaranteed ADR providers could be accessed, Civil Justice Council, ‘ADR and
Civil Justice: Final Report’, November 2018, para 6.11 available at https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-
content/uploads/2018/12/CJC-ADR-Report-FINAL-Dec-2018.pdf

210 Expanding, for instance, on what is currently offered by the Civil Mediation Council, which offers
“Civil & Commercial” and “Workplace” mediation at https://civilmediation.org/mediator-search/

211 As is currently the case with the disrepair protocol, which links to the Civil Mediation Council
website, ibid.

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