Churchill, in context: how English courts came to order ADR

If you work around motor claims you will hear the word Churchill used as shorthand — usually in a sentence about why alternative dispute resolution suddenly matters. This piece is an orientation for anyone meeting that shorthand for the first time: what the case was, what came before and after it, and why it changed behaviour across the market. It is a timeline with sources, not an argument.

The starting position: courts could encourage, not order

For twenty years the reference point was Halsey v Milton Keynes General NHS Trust (2004). The Court of Appeal said that compelling unwilling parties to mediate would obstruct their right of access to the court. Courts could encourage ADR — robustly, and with costs consequences for parties who unreasonably refused it — but ordering it was understood to be off limits.

That settled view shaped a generation of litigation practice. ADR sat alongside the court process as something you could be penalised for ignoring, but never made to do.

The turn: Churchill (November 2023)

Churchill v Merthyr Tydfil County Borough Council (2023) was, on its facts, a modest dispute — a claim against a council over Japanese knotweed, and the question of whether the claimant should first have used the council’s internal complaints procedure. Its significance is what the Court of Appeal decided on the way: the famous passage in Halsey was not binding, and courts can lawfully stay proceedings and order the parties to engage in non-court dispute resolution — provided the order does not extinguish the parties’ right to a judicial hearing, and is proportionate to settling the dispute fairly, quickly and at reasonable cost.

The decision did not come from nowhere. The Civil Justice Council had concluded in 2021 that compulsory ADR could be lawful and, done properly, desirable. Churchill turned that direction of travel into law.

Into the rules: October 2024

From 1 October 2024, the Civil Procedure Rules were amended to carry Churchill into everyday case management. Promoting and using ADR became part of the overriding objective; judges’ case-management powers now expressly include ordering the parties to engage in it; and a party’s failure to engage with ADR is squarely part of the costs analysis.

That last point is the practical one. The question a claims organisation now has to be able to answer is not “did we win?” but “can we show we engaged?” — because the costs conversation at the end of a case can turn on it.

The ‘so what’, for someone outside the market

Put the three dates together and the shape is clear:

• 2004 — Halsey: ADR is voluntary. Courts may nudge; they may not order.
• 2023 — Churchill: courts may order it.
• 2024 — the CPR: ordering and evidencing it becomes routine machinery, with costs consequences attached.

Dispute resolution outside the courtroom moved, in one decade-defining step, from encouraged to expected. For volume motor claims — where the court backlog is measured in months and the amounts at stake rarely justify a hearing — the parties who do best under the new arrangement are the ones who can demonstrate structured, good-faith engagement from the first exchange. That is the context in which platforms like ours exist, and it is why the audit trail — every offer, response and decision, timestamped — has become as important as the outcome itself.

This piece is background, not legal advice. The judgments linked above are the primary sources, and better company than any summary of them.