Legal Services Bill [Lords]

Unfortunately, the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill) is no longer in the Chamber. He described some Members on the Labour Benches as obsessed. He chose his terminology injudiciously; a better description would be ““diligent””. The people who are obsessed in this debate, as they have been throughout the two years of the Bill's proceedings, are those who want to maintain the privileged position of the legal profession and everything to do with it. We have heard the same thing again today. The suggestion that the board's having a permanent lay chairperson could lead to a Division called by Her Majesty's Opposition casts some doubt over the wisdom of the Conservative party and about its contact with the real world. However, in the real politics, I shall be generous to the Opposition. The obsession seems to be with preserving the status quo and the privileges of the legal profession, and in my brief remarks I shall speak in support of the amendment that I have signed. I shall cite as closely as I can the words of the late James Sheppard, who was one of my constituents, because I always like to ensure that the House comes into the real world when we are discussing the problems of regulating the legal profession. When I first called meetings of miners—usually those who had retired—and their widows, they had no understanding of what the Law Society was and had never heard of the Bar Standards Board or the Bar Council. I had never taken cases to court and had no knowledge whatever but I realised that something was going wrong. I received backing at every one of my initial meetings from Mr. James Sheppard, a retired miner who was very ill. He was probably also very aged, but it was hard to tell because he was so ill that one could not be certain of his age. One could be certain, however, that he would ensure that all my meetings were wheelchair-accessible, because his emphysema meant that he was permanently wheelchair-bound. Despite that, at every meeting he insisted on getting out of his wheelchair—initially, much to my fear—to deliver a speech. I watched him teeter to his feet and wondered how long he could stand before falling down, but on every occasion—from first to last—he raised himself to his feet with the aid of his sticks and delivered the most eloquent of speeches. Mr. Sheppard spoke on behalf of retired miners everywhere. He explained his life and work, and told us how during the war coal was dug by people such as him to ensure that we could produce armaments and keep the power going to sustain the war effort. Their service was belatedly recognised by the Ministry of Defence through the Bevin boys medal. Throughout the post-war period, miners in constituencies such as mine worked in collieries where health and safety was an afterthought. That is why miners won a court battle on emphysema. Such stories are mere words when they are bandied around in this place, but they are not mere words when someone such as Mr. Sheppard is struggling for breath and demanding to know why a solicitor took part of his industrial disease compensation with no right to do so. When I first heard Mr. Sheppard, neither he nor I had a clue about the regulations or how he could take his case forward. It took me 18 months to devise a mechanism so that one of the cases would hold up before the Law Society and my miners could get their money back. That was eventually too late for Mr. James Sheppard, because he did not see justice; his wife had to get justice for the late Mr. Sheppard. That is the kind of problem that we are dealing with, and it is why when we make a proposal suggesting that a lay person should chair the board that oversees the regulation of the profession, it seems to me and to all my constituents that we are being rather modest in doing so. If one wants to take the other extreme, I note how, when the Bill was first proposed, all parties in the House ensured that every member of the Joint Committee on the draft Bill came from the legal profession. Some of us are not obsessed; we are diligent on behalf of our constituents in ensuring that those who do not earn a good living from the legal profession have a system in place that allows them access to justice. That access to justice did not exist for my constituents because they could not see it. Only when the scale of the solicitors' greed came to the fore did we begin to win some changes. If that had not happened, such things would still have been going on. I remind the House that, even today, the vast majority of cases that have been settled come from three constituencies. If I get the opportunity later in the proceedings, I will name three new solicitors today. One of them has been in my sights for some time; the other two have come to light just this weekend. They are new solicitors, and I have not had the opportunity to deal with them, unlike the 45 from whom I have got money back before. I hope that some Opposition Members will be courageous enough to think things through. A person in my constituency or others who has an average knowledge of the law—Mr. Sheppard was far from average—wants a legal profession that is confident enough in itself and in its own decency confidently to welcome someone who is independent of that profession overseeing and regulating the board. I have received a large number of letters from legal professionals shocked by the minority who have abused the honour of their profession, and none of them are worrying about the independence of a lay chair. So I hope that the Opposition will rethink their disgraceful call to push the issue to a vote.