Following pressure from industry groups, the Lord Chancellor introduced the Arbitration Bill into Parliament, having it passed hours before the dissolution of James Callaghan's government.

Academics met the Act with a mixed response; while some praised it for bringing English law more into line with that of other nations, others criticised the wording used as unnecessarily complex and hazy.

London was historically a centre for trade and arbitration, which Peter S. Smedresman, writing in the Journal of Maritime Law and Commerce divides into three categories of transaction.

However, it failed to significantly attract more modern forms of trade, such as major communications developments or high-technology projects, due to the nature of its arbitration law.

These contracts normally involve large amounts of money and are administered by the International Chamber of Commerce, which rarely sent arbitration cases to London due to the individual nature of English law on the subject.

[4] Before the 1979 act, English law did not provide many ways to avoid the case stated procedure, even prohibiting parties from agreeing in advance not to use it; this was due to Scrutton LJ's statement, in Czarnikow v Roth, Schmidt & Co,[5] that "There must be no Alsatia in England where the King's writ does not run".

[9] By the 1960s, even before the increase of abuse of the case stated procedure, the United Kingdom was estimated to be losing £500 million a year through the movement of arbitration business to other countries.

[10] In response, the Lord Chancellor convened a Commercial Court Users Conference in 1960, and tasked them with reviewing the system; the conclusion was that the status quo should remain.

This was intended to ensure that any new act of Parliament fulfilled two roles – firstly, decreasing the use of the case stated procedure, and secondly, encouraging arbitrators to give reasons for their decisions.

As "the final drama", the Arbitration Bill quickly made it to the House of Commons and was passed during the few hours it took Callaghan to get to Buckingham Palace and ask for a dissolution.

[21] Staughton LJ, with the rest of the court in agreement, explained that: the judge should give such weight as he thinks fit to the failure to argue the point before the arbitrator.

Section 3 provides that, where such an agreement is drafted, the High Court no longer has the automatic right to request additional reasons from the arbitrator or grant leave to appeal the decision.

[36] Smedresman, however, argued that it would do little to help attract new arbitration and would in fact drive it away, saying that "the vagueness of the statutory language, combined with the rather hazy policy considerations behind the Act, make confusion and litigation likely".

In the style of the Parliamentary Draftsmen of that time, many of its provisions were drafted with a complexity which was happily avoided in the 1996 Act", and criticises the failure to achieve more than minor reform of existing law.

However, he does note that the Act led to a shift in judicial policy, with future judgments to be issued with regards "to the need for finality...the striving for legal accuracy may be said to have been overtaken by commercial expediency".