The idea of establishing a CLAF has been raised before, most recently in a working party of the Bar Council chaired by Guy Mansfield QC, but the ‘project went into abeyance after 2011’, said Jackson LJ, as the professions wanted to assess the impact of the reforms to costs and the legal aid cutbacks.

Jackson LJ was the author of a major report on the reform of civil litigation costs, which was published in December 2009. His recommendations formed the basis of the changes to civil litigation costs rules eventually introduced by the government in LASPO. As he pointed out in his speech, given last month, he had stated in his final report that he was against any cutbacks to civil legal aid.

A number of Australian states, observed Jackson LJ, have established successful self-financing civil litigation funding schemes along the lines of what he is proposing for England and Wales. A CLAF, he said, would need an initial injection of cash, which could come from the government, individual lawyers who would buy bonds or a charitable trust. He also suggested that, ‘[p]ossibly the UK National Lottery might be as generous as the Jockey Club’, the charity that funds a similar scheme in Hong Kong.

LAG’s director, Steve Hynes (pictured), said he believes ‘the loss of recoverable success fees and after-event insurance premiums means that a CLAF for England and Wales could be an idea whose time has come’.