Legal background SLAPPs
Courts apply procedural rules to ensure justice is provided to all parties to litigation. Procedural rules provide parties the opportunity to properly present their case, and for that case to be challenged, so that an impartial court can determine the correct outcome. Justice requires that the operation of those rules ensures cases can be dealt with in a reasonable time and at proportionate cost. Such rules therefore seek to prevent the misuse of litigation by ensuring weak cases or cases that seek to abuse the system, such as through excessive cost or delay, are dismissed speedily, either by allowing them to be struck out or by allowing summary judgment to be given in favour of a party.
	SLAPPs claims most commonly arise in civil litigation to which the Civil Procedure Rules 1998 (CPR) apply. Those procedural rules are made by the Civil Procedure Rule Committee under the Civil Procedure Act 1997.
	The Government considers that although SLAPPs can properly be identified as claims that seek to abuse the process, as described in the case of Broxton v McLelland, [1995] EMLR 485, the operation of the CPR does not successfully tackle them. As such, the CPR must be amended to ensure SLAPPs can be appropriately dealt with.
	As the definition of a SLAPP claim carefully balances fundamental issues of freedom of speech in the prevention of economic crime against access to justice the Government considers that definition and the appropriate test for early dismissal is a matter which Parliament must address. Although the underpinning procedural rules will be implemented via the Civil Procedure Rule Committee alongside new rules for a cost protection regime. These provisions therefore aim to do that.
	The Act introduces a definition of a SLAPP claim which incorporates matters that the Government considers are specific to such claims, including the requisite connection to economic crime.
	In addition, the Act requires new civil procedure rules enabling an early dismissal of SLAPP claims based on the tests established in the Act, which is whether the claimant can demonstrate that the case is more likely than not to succeed at trial.
	The Act also requires new civil procedure rules which imposes costs implications for claimants in those SLAPPs claims which cannot be dismissed at that stage.
	Further, the Act also contains a power that the Lord Chancellor may exercise by regulations requiring other rules of court to be made by other rule making bodies or persons to introduce the same procedural provisions for other cases.
	Details on how the early dismissal and cost protection mechanisms will operate will be determined by the Civil Procedure Rule Committee and approved in the normal manner by the Lord Chancellor, Master of the Rolls and Parliament.
	Whilst legislating to require the making of court rules is a deviation from the norm it is not unprecedented and these are exceptional measures to deal with exceptional behaviours which represent an abuse of our legal system.