You arrived at this page by selecting:Tribunal Changes (YEP and T & A 22/05/08)
Our beloved government has announced changes to the tribunal system. Allow me to explain.
Many many years ago the idea got around that there were far too many courts and they were far too complicated for the common man to follow. So tribunals were invented and were meant to be lawyer free to make the whole process a lot simpler. At first there was one tribunal, but they liked them so much they decided to have another and then another. These days tribunals are all over the place for all sorts of subjects.
The government now says there are far too many tribunals about, and wants to bring them all together with just one tribunal. It will consist of a first tier tribunal and an upper tribunal. Each of these tribunals will be split into chambers. There will be five chambers in the first tier and if you want to appeal from a decision of any of these chambers you will then go to one of the three upper tribunal chambers. So that's all very clear then!
Instead of having, for example, a tax tribunal, like we have nowadays, there will now be a tax chamber of the single unified tribunal. Easy. You don't think so? Well you must be wrong because this is what the government says, and their press release makes clear that these changes are designed to 'make the process easier for the public to understand'.
In reality lawyers appear just as much at tribunals as they do at court and therefore they are just as complicated. If I peer into my crystal ball I believe that in a few years from now some bright spark will look at this 'unified' tribunal system and say “why is it that we've got this tribunal system here and that court system over there. Why are there two? Why don't we just put them together, and save a load of faff� So we'll put them back together and end up back where we started with one court system.
Looking even further to the future, somebody will eventually say “isn't it awful how complicated the courts are, we really should invent something that's nice and straightforward that the common man can understandâ€. No doubt a committee will ponder the matter, and then invent something new. How about tribunals?
All this of course in the cause of 'making the process easier for the public to understand'. What we really need to do is to take the bull by the horns and completely reform the whole Legal System to make it more straightforward. After all the law was created for the people, the average man or woman in the street and not for lawyers. I believe that is where the complexity and confusion really lies.
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