The High Court ordered Pascal Hosford to pay half of the respondents’ costs of their motion to strike out his proceedings, including half of reserved costs and half of the costs of two sets of written submissions. The costs are to be measured by the Office of the Legal Costs Adjudicator if the parties cannot agree. Enforcement is stayed for 28 days and, if there is an appeal, pending its determination or a decision on an application for leave to appeal to the Supreme Court.
Mr Justice Garrett Simons delivered the supplemental costs judgment on 22 March 2021. The proceedings had already been dismissed in their entirety in a principal judgment delivered on 3 March 2021, which found they were irregular in form and an abuse of process. The supplemental judgment addressed costs only.
Hosford, who represented himself, asked the court to make no costs order or defer one until other proceedings had concluded. He described the present case as an “honest false start” and said he had not intended to abuse process or reopen concluded proceedings. He also referred to an appeal pending before the Court of Appeal and proceedings he apparently intended to issue.
The judge declined to defer the costs decision. He said the other proceedings raised substantive issues that did not overlap with the procedural grounds on which this case had been dismissed. Their outcome would not change the finding that the present proceedings had not been properly constituted.
Under the Legal Services Regulation Act 2015, the respondents were prima facie entitled to costs as the entirely successful parties, but the court could make a different order. The judge considered that Hosford should have known he could not revisit issues decided against him in earlier judicial review proceedings. Those proceedings were dismissed in 2015, and a costs order was made against him. The judgment records that the parties later agreed the respondents would not enforce that order on the understanding that Hosford would not appeal; they applied to have it vacated.
The judge said it was unreasonable for Hosford to continue after being served with the motion to strike out, which challenged his attempt to revisit issues already determined. The respondents had to pursue the motion to a hearing and succeeded. However, the judge also took account of Hosford’s lack of legal representation and said some other procedural irregularities might have been less obvious to a lay litigant. He therefore reduced the costs award to half of the respondents’ costs of the motion.