Is it because the Government has to make tough choices about how it spends our money? No - the changes will not save the Government a single penny.
You may have missed this great new initiative - it is part of the Government's Access to Justice policy. Cut through the political spin and you find a policy that will deny justice to many injury victims, make it more expensive for others, but cheaper for those who cause injury.
At the moment there is an easy to understand principle: loser pays all, including lawyer's costs. In accident claims - where the bill will always be paid by an insurance company - this means that the person who causes the accident pays all the costs associated with it.
The Government wants to end this and limit the legal expenses the injured person, or whoever supports them, can recover from the losing insurance company. How has this happened?
The Tory Government supported plans put forward by Master of the Rolls Lord Woolf to streamline civil justice and "fix" legal costs. Lord Woolf made many useful recommendations but on fixed costs he got it wrong.
Taking on an insurance company is an uneven battle. In real life an injured person with few resources and everything to prove sues an insurance company with limitless resources.
In their television adverts the insurance companies just can't wait to get that cheque in the post. The reality in personal injury cases is that they deny, delay and frustrate claims in the hope that the injured person will give up or accept lower compensation.
The injured person runs up costs in dealing with these tactics but, at the moment they can do so safe in the knowledge that they will recover these costs when they win. In future they won't.
This will put pressure on the injured person to settle a claim for less than it is worth or abandon it altogether because the cost of taking the claim will outweigh what they will get back. And the vast majority of cases which are fought by injured people are won.
Insurance companies are the one group who will gain by these proposals. They welcome the move because they stand to make millions by not having to pay the full legal costs of the injured person.
This will make an unequal battle even more unequal. The insurance company will still spend, as they do now, thousands of pounds defending and defeating claims.
The money saved with "fixed" costs will mean insurance companies have even more to spend doing so. And that means more injured people losing out.
Why should these changes bother unions? Last year the Legal Aid Board helped only 30,000 people injured at work or on the roads.
Trade unions helped 150,000 people and recovered £330 million in compensation at no cost to the taxpayer. In fact the Department of Social Security will recover £179.9 million in this financial year alone in DSS benefits recovered from negligent employers thanks to trade union legal schemes.
The simple fact is that trade unions are the biggest providers of legal services to injured people so they have most to lose in terms of legal costs they will no longer be able to recover. The proposed changes will mean insurers will no longer have to pay £25 million a year in legal costs to unions who win claims on behalf of members.
It sounds like the sort of thing the last Tory Government thought up and which should have been ditched by the new Labour Government. That's because it is.