Very few DRS cases are appealed - fewer than 0.01%. A complete list of past appeals is available. In the DRS an appeal is heard by a panel of 3 experts. Information about which experts hear an appeal and how they are chosen is in the experts section.

Timescales

If you want to appeal, you must act within 10 working days of the date that the parties are deemed to have got the decision of the first expert.

You have two choices:

• you can send your appeal notice (see below) and the appeal fee (£3,000 + VAT)
• or you can send a notice of intention to appeal (which is just a letter or email saying that you want to appeal, but not giving details of why) plus a deposit of £300 + VAT.
  

If you send a notice of intention to appeal, you then have 15 working days to get the appeal notice to us. You should know that the deposit is non-refundable.

Appeal notice

An appeal notice should not be more than 1000 words and should explain your full reasons for appealing, but should not give any new evidence or attachments. This is your only real chance to put your case to the appeal panel, but do not forget that they will already have all the paperwork from the first decision.

What we do next

We will send the appeal notice to the other party, who can then send an appeal notice response (also limited at 1,000 words) which should explain why the appeal should be turned down.

In theory, we can also ask the appeal panel to answer questions about the policy and procedure which it wants solved for future cases. The answers the panel gives to these questions do not affect the current case, but may make things simpler later. In practice, we have not yet used this power.

The appeal panel

Appeals are heard by three experts, and they have 30 days to make their decision. In many ways, they act like a normal expert, except that you cannot appeal an appeal decision.

Appeal decisions

An appeal decision is said to be 'persuasive but not binding' on other experts. This means that if an appeal panel has set out some general principle about the DRS, other experts are likely to follow it, but they can decide not to if they want.