How the civil courts of England and Wales are structured
From the County Court to the Supreme Court, a guide to the hierarchy that decides civil disputes and how a case moves up it on appeal.
The civil courts of England and Wales, the courts that decide disputes between people and organisations rather than trying crimes, form a hierarchy. Understanding the tiers, and how a case moves between them, explains a great deal about how litigation actually works and why where a claim starts matters.
Most civil claims begin in the County Court. It handles the great bulk of everyday civil litigation, from debt and contract disputes to personal injury and housing, and cases within it are allocated to tracks according to their value and complexity: broadly, a small claims track for the lowest-value matters, a fast track and an intermediate track for the middle range, and the multi-track for the largest and most complex. The allocation affects the procedure, the costs that can be recovered and how the case is managed.
Higher-value and more complex civil cases are heard in the High Court, based at the Royal Courts of Justice in London but sitting in regional centres too. The High Court is organised into three divisions. The King’s Bench Division, renamed from the Queen’s Bench Division on the accession of King Charles III, deals with contract and tort claims and contains a number of specialist courts. The Chancery Division handles business, property, trusts, insolvency and intellectual property disputes. The Family Division deals with family matters. Which division hears a case depends on its subject matter.
Above the trial courts sit the appeal courts. The Court of Appeal, whose Civil Division is headed by the Master of the Rolls, hears appeals from the County Court and the High Court. It is purely an appellate court: it does not retry cases but reviews whether the court below made an error of law or, in some circumstances, of fact. Permission to appeal is generally required, so not every disappointed litigant reaches it.
At the apex is the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, which replaced the Appellate Committee of the House of Lords in 2009. It is the final court of appeal for civil cases from England and Wales, and it hears only a small number of cases each year, typically those raising points of law of general public importance. Its decisions bind all the courts below.
Two threads run through the structure. The first is that appeals move upward and that permission is usually needed to climb, so the higher a case goes the more it has been filtered. The second is the doctrine of precedent: a decision of a higher court binds the courts beneath it, which is why a Supreme Court or Court of Appeal ruling can settle a point of law far beyond the parties to the case in which it was decided. The hierarchy is not just an administrative arrangement; it is how the law itself is made consistent.