Legal Services Bill [HL]

I strongly support the amendment and wholly agree with my noble friend Lord Kingsland and the noble and learned Baroness. This spreads, in my experience, to the criminal law. In a sense, this is a complete reversal of where we were 30 or 40 years ago, when we were too far pitched the other way. You could not sue a barrister, except in very limited circumstances, and you had very little redress. In her speech on the previous amendment, the Minister emphasised the importance of fairness. The Chamber was seeking to be fair to complainants and not to have unfair threats hanging over them. It must be important to be fair to both sides. People’s animus and sense of dissatisfaction carries on whether this involves just the Family Division, as she so eloquently said, or all other fields of legal dispute. Many people will never let the subject go; they make complaints that they believe to be well founded but an independent adjudicator—the ombudsman—may not agree and the complaint would not be upheld. It is a strain for any barrister or solicitor who is faced with that problem to have to deal with it in any event, but to have to do so knowing that costs are being run up against you in a wholly unfounded case will be seen by every member of the public and every Member of this House to be deeply unfair, I should have thought. I very much hope that the Minister will reflect on that.