England and Wales High Court (Senior Courts Costs Office) Decisions

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You are here: BAILII >> Databases >> England and Wales High Court (Senior Courts Costs Office) Decisions >> Mealing McLeod v Common Professional Examination Board [2000] EWHC 9007 (Costs) (13 March 2000)
URL: http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Costs/2000/9007.html
Cite as: [2000] EWHC 9007 (Costs)

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This summary of a judgment has been obtained from the Supreme Court Costs Office pages on the HM Courts Service web site. The citation used by BAILII is not an officially approved citation. The full text of the judgment may have an official Neutral Citation issued by the court, and may be available elsewhere on BAILII.

 

 

 No.7 of 2000

Mealing McLeod v Common Professional Examination Board

13 March 2000

Mr Justice Buckley Sitting with Assessors

 

This review case concerned the costs of a litigant in person.

The first ground of appeal concerned the appropriate allowances to be made to a litigant in person under rule 48.6 of the CPR. The Learned Judge gratefully accepted the guidance laid down by Mr Justice Jacob in Morris v Wiltshire & Woodspring District Council (No.3 of 1998) but felt that the Costs Judge had in certain instances allowed somewhat less time than he and the assessors thought he should have done to complete the particular tasks in question, and CPR rule 48.6(4) does suggest that more time should be allowed to a litigant in person than to a solicitor doing the same task.

The second ground was that the costs which were awarded to a solicitor and the costs awarded to a litigant in person were so greatly different that the former must be disproportionate, and she sought to rely on CPR rule 44.5. The Judge said of this submission:

"The submission, I am afraid, is misconceived. If as was the case here, a litigant in person is restricted to the litigant in person charging rate of £9.25 per hour, it is inevitable that the costs of the other side, if legally represented, are likely to be very much higher. The proportionality mentioned in CPR 44.5 is that the costs incurred by a party must be proportionate to the amount of the claim and the litigation generally. It does not mean that the costs of a legally represented party must be reduced below a reasonable level of remuneration because the other side is a litigant in person restricted to payment of £9.25 per hour."

The third principal ground of appeal however was that the Costs Judge was wrong to restrict the appellant to £9.25 per hour, and he should have accepted her evidence of financial loss by allowing £80 per hour, or at least some higher rate than the £9.25 which he did allow. The appellant had been employed as a principal consultant with KPMG, and alleged that she had lost a bonus of some £3,700 from that employment as a result of working on the appeal at which she succeeded. In addition she claimed to have undertaken legal work for private clients in 1996, but that owing to her commitments to the appeal she had turned away two potentially lucrative matters, one of them offering a fee of between £2,000 and £3,000, and the other one of £10,000.

The appellant did not produce any evidence as to her loss of earnings, and so following the case of Mainwaring v Goldtech Investments Ltd (1997) 1 All ER 467 the Judge was not satisfied that the claimant had sustained any loss of earnings and refused to allow more than £9.25 per hour. In the absence of any further or better evidence from the appellant the Judge dismissed her appeal on this point also.