Legal Services Bill [Lords]

I agree totally with my hon. Friend. I would like the legal services board’s powers over the approved regulators laid down in statute, so that the general public are protected. On the question that he asks about confidentiality, and allowing misconduct cases to go forward and then hiding them away, the Watson Burton case came to light only by accident—a copy of the ruling came into my hands, and I felt it appropriate to give him a copy too, as he had far more such cases in his area. Through that, the issue got into the wider arena, so people could see what was happening. How many more slaps on the wrist, or worse, have there been against solicitors? The public have a right to know, in order to make an informed choice about whom to go to, whom not to go to, and whether a potential claims exists in relation to mismanagement. The Accident Group case, for example, involved enormous mismanagement. The public and legislators have a right to know, and that needs to be built in to ensure full openness. If solicitors have behaved badly, and decisions are made against them through regulation by their profession, those decisions should be made available to the general public, not kept quiet. In a similar vein, there should be the power to enforce decisions. There should be an instruction to pay back—perhaps to pay back a dying miner, and perhaps the three dying miners in my constituency who died during the course of their claim. There was also the case of the miner’s widow who wanted the money for her husband’s headstone and who died in the process of winning justice, after the ruling against the solicitor who had refused to give her the money to pay for her headstone and that of her husband. What disrepute does that bring the profession into? Could a profession get any lower than that? When people say that there should not be robust regulation of the profession, I can provide case after case to show that there should be. I could spend the rest of the evening—although I will not, Mr. Deputy Speaker, you will be glad to know—tomorrow and the day after illustrating the need for robust regulation with individual cases just of my constituents. I have astonishing cases of people fighting for basic justice, in which the wrong done to them is obvious to anyone looking in from outside. They have never dealt with the legal profession before and need the money, although not as a good-will gesture of winning a case and thereby winning justice. I have in mind the miner who is dying from emphysema and who needs the money for breathing equipment; those miners who go to solicitors who give them all the pat about how they should not have it back and, when they challenge the senior partner directly, face to face, still do not get the money paid back; and those who have been waiting three years—three years!—for justice after adjudication because the cases have not gone in front of the solicitors disciplinary tribunal. I have scores of those cases to deal with and many more in the pipeline. They are what the Bill needs to be about. The other place has watered the Bill down, but the other place has vested interests—declared vested interests, according to Hansard—and it should not have watered it down, but beefed it up. Cases from my area are not reaching the Bar Council because I have a day job to do as well, but I can assure the House that plenty are in the pipeline. Perhaps I will push some of them slightly higher up the order following this debate. I have tonnes and tonnes more cases. Let me illustrate those cases with an example that shows some of the weaknesses, and I hope that the Government will be wary of expanding the market too quickly—making it too open—without giving thought to the consequences. The example is the conditional fee agreements and the hearing loss cases, involving miners, textile workers, steel workers and engineering workers, and if it is happening in my area, it is happening across the country. There are two forms of funding for that, which is why we have a case against them. Often, a claims handler grabs hold of the case and sells it on to a solicitor, who sells it on to another solicitor, who gives it to a legal executive, who commissions a private health company to get in a GP, from which the solicitors’ firm gets a bit of commission. They take a loan out and get commission from the loan for insurance. The claim goes to a barrister, who writes up the facts, which I could have written up in five minutes—I do not exaggerate—and then charges for writing an opinion, which becomes the case taken forward. There is something very badly wrong if my constituent wins a case for industrial deafness but finds that the amount of money going to that plethora of vested interests is four, five, six, seven or eight—sometimes even 10—times what he is getting. That may well be something for the Bar Council to consider, but I want one body where I can take the whole job lot and say, ““You sort it out,”” because I’ve had to fight each case individually. I spend more money on filing cabinets—that is true—than any other piece of office equipment to stick all the files in. There are hundreds of pages in each one, because legal defences arrive, written by counsel on behalf of a solicitor, trying to stop my constituents gaining access to justice—in other words, prolonging the misery when the solicitors know that they are wrong. Those are the simple cases, not the complex ones that will take even longer. Where is the justice in that? I allege that tens of thousands of industrial deafness cases and tens of thousands of cases that have already been compensated for industrial deafness—in other words, people who are partially or largely deaf—have solely been handled over the telephone. Where is the justice in accessing justice for those people? There has been no face-to-face meeting, and key decisions have been made. That is a scandal that all the regulatory bodies, from the Bar Council through to the Law Society, should be dealing with. The whole profession has operated on the basis that that is perfectly acceptable because the people live in rural mining areas and are not always nearby. Therefore they can grab the case and deal with them over the telephone. Strangely, a 91-year-old with a claim for industrial deafness might not always be able to hear. If I can manage to see my constituents face to face, why cannot the solicitor, who is being paid to represent them, do so? If they do not—this is endemic in the profession—who is going to do something about it? That needs to be part of the regulatory role. The LSB should be about ensuring that we have best practice. It comes as a shock to solicitors in other parts of the country who are used to dealing with more matter-of-course matters—although not more mundane matters—to learn about such scams and scandals, and it is a shock when they see the profit involved. Who are the highest paid solicitors? The legal profession, through its own journals, now advertises the fact that phenomenal amounts of money are being made out of those practices. Their powers are not a small side issue. I have come across solicitors’ firms that refuse to release the files of dying miners who want me to go through the files to see whether the full claim was put in. The legal service makes the claim, including additional things such as not being able to wash up or having to have someone come in to clean or cook. I find that the claims are often not done in full. Why? Incompetence. The solicitor has ticked a few boxes and sent the claim in but has not done the full job. The only way we know that is by looking at the file, and yet despite the fact that we have won more than £20,000 for several people by challenging those claims—although perhaps that is why—firms still refuse to hand over the files. That is another role for the legal services board: to get the profession’s house in order.