New Bill to reform Scotland’s civil courts

Measures to ensure the right cases are heard in the right courts at the right cost are included in a new Bill recently published by the Scottish Government.

The Courts Reform (Scotland) Bill follows the Scottish Civil Courts Review, which recommended substantial changes to modernise and improve the structure and operation of the courts.

Some of the key provisions contained in the Bill are:

• Increasing the threshold under which the sheriff court can exclusively deal with civil cases from £5,000 to £150,000 - freeing up the Court of Session to deal with the most challenging civil disputes. This is expected to strengthen the role of the sheriff court, while reducing costs and delays for litigants.
• Creation of a national Sheriff Appeal Court to deal with summary criminal appeals from sheriff and justice of the peace courts, and civil appeals from sheriff courts. This will help avoid the need for some civil appeals to be heard in the Court of Session and some criminal appeals in the High Court, delivering more proportionate costs, while preserving the right to appeal to the higher courts.
• Creation of a new judicial post – the summary sheriff - to resolve lower value civil cases such as debt cases more swiftly and efficiently, while also dealing with summary criminal cases.
• Plans for specialist sheriffs and specialist summary sheriffs in areas of law such as family, housing, personal injury and commercial law, with the expertise to deal with these issues as swiftly as possible.

Welcoming the provisions in the Bill to make it easier for small businesses to recover outstanding debts, Colin Borland, the Federation of Small Businesses’ head of external affairs in Scotland, said:

“Pursuing a debt through the courts can be a prohibitively lengthy, uncertain and expensive slog for a small business. Many larger companies know this and use their small suppliers as free credit with impunity. Figures published at the end of last month show that more than half of our members were paid late by their big customers last year.

“It therefore makes perfect sense for all cases with a value of up to £150,000 to be dealt with at the Sheriff Court – not shunted off to the costly Court of Session.”

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