Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

I support my noble friend. My name is on most of the amendments in his name, although not Amendment 137D. I commend him on the clarity with which he spoke to what is an extremely complex set of issues. I wonder whether putting 30 technical amendments in a single group is really an efficacious way of legislating. I am bound to say that the background to these intensely complex practical and theoretical issues does not seem to have been adequately prepared. I endeavoured on day five of Committee to move an amendment calling for a review of clinical negligence cases, which are in a special class of sophistication of their own, and I hope to move it again on Report. I hope that the Minister will not mind my saying that I believe that there has been insufficient preparation for our debates on those matters. I add only a couple of facts to the underlay to the group spoken to by my noble friend Lord Thomas of Gresford. The position in respect of claims and litigation generally is a mess, let us make no bones about it. It is in a fiendish mess. I speak as one who has always been deeply concerned about the whole concept of conditional fees, which seem to me to be in permanent danger of undermining the professionalism of lawyers, because they have a deep conflict of interest when acting on a conditional fee basis vis-à-vis both their clients and their professional obligations. That is where we are, and perhaps one day we will consider how other countries deal with the problem of how to fund bringing cases to law. Perhaps Germany would be a good example, where the whole field of costs insurance is infinitely further developed than it is here and seems to provide their citizens with a rough equality of access to justice that we no longer have with the progressive dismantling of the legal aid scheme. To undermine the points made by my noble friend Lord Thomas, one fact struck me forcefully. According to a general insurer from whom the Ministry of Justice has obtained statistics in preparation for the Bill, costs as a proportion of the damages have risen from one half in 1999—whatever the client got by way of damages, the costs were roughly one half—to being roughly equivalent by 2004 and costs now exceed damages by 50 per cent. In the space of just over 10 years, that huge swing in the division of spoils between the lawyers and the insurers on the one hand and a client on the other has taken place. That must give rise to intense concern on the part of anyone and everyone. As I said, I think that the amendments in the group in the name of my noble friend Lord Thomas to which my name is attached improve things a bit, but we should not deceive ourselves that we will end up with fair access to justice.