Report on the Arbitration Act 1996

Abstract

THE CONCLUSIONS reached in this Report are an enormous tribute to the Act and, by extension, to those responsible for its authorship: Lord Saville of Newdigate (then Lord Justice Saville), who chaired the Departmental Advisory Committee; Toby Landau of Essex Court Chambers, who acted as his right-hand man throughout the drafting process, and Geoffrey Sellers, the Parliamentary Draughtsman responsible for writing the Bill that became the Act. That the Report has been prepared is thanks to the hundreds of people who responded to the survey on which its conclusions are based. But it is also as a result of the efforts of many others who are mentioned in paragraph 4; and those of the members of the Committee that organised the survey, for whose help and support I am profoundly grateful. 1. The Arbitration Act 1996 came into effect on 31 January 1997. As the tenth anniversary approached, a number of bodies – in particular at first the British Maritime Law Association and the London Shipping Law Centre – thought that it would be appropriate to review the Act's workings in order to see whether, in the light of ten years' experience, any revisions to it might usefully be proposed. At their request Bruce Harris agreed to set up and chair a committee for this purpose. Almost simultaneously the Commercial Court Users' Committee (‘CCC’), then chaired by Mr Justice (now Lord Justice) Thomas, concluded that such a review should be carried out and adopted the project upon which, by then, some preliminary work had been done. This report describes the work undertaken and sets out the committee's conclusions following a comprehensive survey into how the Act has worked in practice. 2. The governmental Departmental Advisory Committee (‘DAC’), which had been responsible for preparing the Bill that subsequently became the Act, …