Parliament created these rules in 1997 and told the committee that makes them to secure a system that is accessible, fair and efficient. The rule the committee wrote to carry that duty, rule 1.1, tells a court to deal with cases justly and at proportionate cost. Cost is in that sentence. The word fairly appears once, lower down, in a list that applies only so far as is practicable.

That is the whole problem, and it is why this campaign calls it the optional fairness rule.

Cost was written into the overriding objective in 2013. Before that the rule told a court to deal with cases justly, and expense sat further down with everything else. So this is not an old rule that nobody has looked at. It is a sentence that was changed thirteen years ago, and the change is what created the gap.

The committee has since shown it will amend that same sentence when it matters. In 2021 it added that the parties must be able to participate fully in proceedings and give their best evidence. That was the committee deciding that effective participation belongs inside the overriding objective and not in a footnote. This campaign asks it to finish the same job with the word Parliament used.

Free specialist legal advice for every 100,000 people saves the public purse about £908 million, because an unresolved legal problem becomes a housing, health, benefits or employment problem that the state pays for later.

The other figures, with their sources, are on The evidence. They point the same way: the cost of a court the public cannot use is already being paid, just not by the people who caused it.

Two records on this site show the same shape in two different sectors. In banking, a complaint was answered, an ombudsman had looked, and the firm wrote that the only way to take it further was through the courts. In social care, every free route closed on a time limit or a power, and the council apologised afterwards anyway.

Neither record shows anyone doing anything improper. Both end in the same place, and that place is run under rule 1.1. How the system closes sets out the gates in full.

This is the part that is easy to miss and it is the reason the campaign exists. A rule that ranks cost above fairness does not need anyone to cheat. It rewards ordinary, defensible decisions: to answer a complaint once and consider it answered, to move a dispute to the forum where the other side is weaker, to weigh one hearing against a full list. Every one of those is reasonable on its own. Together they decide the case before anybody looks at who was right.

A system that produces unfairness without anyone intending it cannot be fixed by finding someone to blame. It is fixed by changing the sentence.

The ask is not a new law, a new body, a new right or a new cost. It is one word added in two places, by the committee that already writes these rules, under the power Parliament already gave it. Every court would then have to deal with cases fairly, justly and at proportionate cost, in that order, from the first case management decision to the last.

It will not cure every fault in the County Court. It removes the one excuse, that cost comes first, that lets the stronger side cut corners without consequence.