Question
To ask Her Majesty’s Government, further to the statement by Lord McNally on 30 January (Official Report, col. 1434) that changes to the way mesothelioma cases are in future handled in the courts in the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill will ““squeeze out from the system the inflation that went to lawyers””, what this inflation consisted of; and how much money they have identified as wrongly claimed by lawyers who have acted in such cases in the last year for which figures are available.
Answer
I was referring to costs in civil litigation generally, which the reforms in Part 2 of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill are intended to address. A general liability insurer has indicated that in 1999 claimant solicitors' costs were equivalent to just over half the damages agreed or awarded at 56 per cent. By 2004, average claimant costs were 103 per cent of the damages. By 2010 average claimant costs represented 142 per cent of the sums received by the injured victims. The NHS Litigation Authority has reported similar rises in the amounts paid to claimant lawyers. This substantial rise in claimant costs is largely due to the way in which conditional fee agreements have worked since the Access to Justice Act 1999. The Ministry of Justice does not record costs data by type of case and so is not able to break the figures down into mesothelioma and other claims. The proposed reforms in the Bill will introduce proportion and fairness to the current CFA regime and should be welcomed. Once our changes take effect, I believe that meritorious claims will be resolved at more proportionate cost, while unnecessary or avoidable claims will be deterred from progressing to court.