Legal Services Bill [Lords]

I am about to get on to that important point. I am pleased that the Minister has stated—not only in her opening remarks today, but in other comments—that the consumer must be at the heart of the Bill. I will not accept any crocodile tears from members of the legal profession saying that it will compromise their independence; I will address that point shortly. It must be recognised that most people have very little or nothing at all to do with the legal profession. As my hon. Friend the Member for Bassetlaw has said, the only time that most clients involved in miners’ compensation cases have contact with a solicitor is if they have done something wrong. Many of the clients are elderly and they trust the solicitor. People have said to me, ““But I’ve signed that piece of paper. Doesn’t that mean I have to pay the money?”” I then have to explain that their solicitor should have told them that they should not pay it. That shows how those people have been misled. An education exercise needs to take place. People should be told what different law firms do and what their rights are. The legal services board should undertake that as part of its remit; it should educate the public about the need to ask questions, and what those questions should be. Many constituents of mine have gone along to firms of solicitors and have not questioned what the solicitors have said. The key point is that solicitors should act in the best interests of their clients, but it is clear that they are not doing so. I mentioned a good example of that in my Adjournment debate just over a week ago: the Durham NUM and Thompsons Solicitors. Thompsons is due a lot of credit for other work that it has done, but its relationship with Durham NUM has been nothing short of a scandal. Their roles have been mixed up. People go to the Durham NUM and are referred on to Thompsons Solicitors. Thompsons take the case, and a fee of 7.5 per cent. is paid back to the Durham NUM. We ask people why they are paying that 7.5 per cent. We also ask Thompsons why it has not advised its clients that they do not need to pay the money. It replies, ““Because we’re acting on behalf of the NUM.”” Thompsons should be acting in the best interests of its clients, and in these cases it is not doing so. The legal services complaints service is doing a good job, but have any solicitors been struck off or been heavily censured? No, they have not, because the current system of self-regulation does not work. My hon. Friend the Member for West Bromwich, West (Mr. Bailey) rightly referred to it as the last vestige of the closed shop. It is interesting that although the Conservatives attacked the closed shop throughout the 1980s—rightly, some would say—they did nothing about this closed shop. Clearly, self-regulation has not worked. How should we move forward? We need a simple system—a one-stop shop where people who have complaints about the legal profession can go. That one body should be the office for legal complaints. However, it must be independent; it must not have any connection with the legal profession. I have taken account of all tonight’s crocodile tears about political interference, but the Law Society and the professional legal services have brought this on themselves by the cavalier way in which they have dealt with my constituents, and those of many other Members. During the speech of the hon. Member for North Southwark and Bermondsey (Simon Hughes), I thought at one point that he was going to start crying about the wonderful job that he thought the House of Lords had done on the Bill. I am sorry, but I have to say that this is what the House of Lords has done to the Bill: the vested interests have gutted it; that is clear from the Hansard record. Apart from a few exceptions, there was little resistance to the idea that it is a great attack on the legal profession. I congratulate Lord Bach—who I understand is a barrister by profession—alone. He said clearly that"““Critics should think carefully before attacking the Bill on the grounds that it threatens or removes the independence of the English legal system. In my view, it does no such thing.””—[Official Report, House of Lords, 6 December 2006; Vol. 687, c. 1177.]" The only other person in the other place who comes out of this very well is Lord Whitty, who is chairman of the National Consumer Council. He said something with which I agree totally—that"““self-regulation does not work for the consumer””" and that"““the consumer has the right to demand that Government intervene””.—[Official Report, House of Lords, 6 December 2006; Vol. 687, c. 1192.]" That is where we are. The Government are intervening, and although the legal profession might not like it, it has, as I have said, brought this upon itself. We have a duty to protect our weak and vulnerable citizens. That is one of the reasons why I went into politics, and one reason why I became a trade union officer was to protect the vulnerable at work. We have also witnessed the use of a back-door argument. It has been suggested that the Bar should somehow be exempt, or be left to self-regulate. The issue is whether the Bar should be brought under the remit of the Bill, and all the arguments that we have heard today from barristers in this place were rehashes of those used in the other place. I do not agree with the idea of taking the Bar out of the system. We need a system that enables people to know where to go to make a complaint—be it about a solicitor or a barrister—and it should be dealt with, and seen to be dealt with, independently of the legal profession. A few weeks ago I had to deal with a complaint to the legal services body which, unusually, was about not miners’ compensation but a divorce case. It was clear that the lady in question had been given very bad service by the local firm of solicitors, who had employed barristers who did not need to be employed. She wanted one point of contact, which is an important issue. Trying to separate the points of contact into two is not acceptable.