This is the sentence that decides how your case is run.
One rule sits above every other rule in civil law. It decides how your case is run, whether you are up against a bank, a council, a landlord, an insurer or an employer. It is the first line of the rule book, and this is what it tells the court to do.
deal with cases justly and at proportionate cost
Cost is named in that sentence. Fairness is not. In the whole of that rule the word fair appears once, further down, on a list of things the court will do where it can.
Nobody tells you this at the start. You find it out years in, after you have spent your savings and your life on the belief that the court was going to be fair with you, because that is what the rule looks like it says.
The rule, in its own words
The first rule tells a court to deal with cases justly and at proportionate cost
. Cost was written into that sentence in 2013. When the rule was made in 1998 the sentence did not mention cost, and fairness and expense sat together in the list beneath it. The word fairly
appears once in the whole rule, in the list beneath that sentence, at rule 1.1(2)(d): ensuring that it is dealt with expeditiously and fairly
. That list applies only so far as is practicable
.
Fairness is in the rule only so far as it is practicable. This campaign calls it the optional fairness rule.
In 1997 Parliament said these rules must be made with a view to a civil justice system that is accessible, fair and efficient
. Moving fairness into the sentence where cost already sits is the whole of the ask.
The same country writes fairness differently for crime
The Criminal Procedure Rules are written by a committee of the same kind, for courts in the same country. Their first rule reads:
“The overriding objective of this procedural code is that criminal cases be dealt with justly.”
Criminal Procedure Rules 2025, rule 1.1(1).
That is the whole objective. Cost is not in it. Underneath, at rule 1.1(2)(c), comes dealing with the prosecution and the defence fairly
, and the words so far as is practicable
appear nowhere in that rule at all.
In crime, fairness is a duty. In civil, fairness is on a list of things the court will do where it can, and cost has been written into the objective itself.
Sources. Criminal Procedure Rules 2025, SI 2025/909, rule 1.1, in force from 6 October 2025; the same words stood in the 2020 Rules they replaced. Civil Procedure Rules 1998, SI 1998/3132, rule 1.1, as amended in 2013, 2021, 2022 and 2024. Both read at legislation.gov.uk.
What we are asking for
Fairness should not be traded for cost.
We are asking the Civil Procedure Rule Committee to change one sentence, so that when fairness and cost pull against each other the rule says which one gives way. At the moment it does not, and the judge is left to choose.
In rule 1.1(1), for justly and at proportionate cost
substitute:
justly and fairly, and at proportionate cost so far as that is consistent with dealing with the case justly and fairly
So the overriding objective would read: enabling the court to deal with cases justly and fairly, and at proportionate cost so far as that is consistent with dealing with the case justly and fairly.
It is not an attack on controlling cost. Cost stays in the rule. It says only that cost gives way to fairness, and not the other way round.
It needs no Act of Parliament. The committee that writes the rules can make this change, and it costs nothing.