Assisted Dying Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton and Lord Carlile of Berriew

Friday 7th November 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Carlile of Berriew]

I accept that the family court would have to have regard to the considerations which are set out in the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Pannick. The difference between that amendment and ours is that ours sets out a very clear way in which the convention issues would have to be considered by the court rather than what amounts to verifying that a process has been followed. On the one hand, we have a process-driven amendment; on the other, we have a legal framework. I will happily give way to the noble Baroness.

[Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton (Lab)]

My Lords, I cannot speak for anyone else on these Benches. I smiled while the noble Lord was speaking because, when he was referring to the fact that there are occasionally rogue doctors, it occurred to me that rogue lawyers have occasionally been known, too.

Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

Debate between Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton and Lord Carlile of Berriew

Tuesday 10th January 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Carlile of Berriew]

My Lords, as another former MP I echo the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Clinton-Davis. Many is the time when Members of another place in their constituency surgeries have to give advice on legal issues to constituents, and it is often the poorest constituents who come with the largest and most complex, multiple legal problems, usually relating to welfare law. There are of course many cases in which an MP can say to a constituent, “Go along to the small claims court, appear on your own behalf and use the words ‘contract’, ‘consideration’ and ‘damage’, and you will do very well”. Litigants in person can succeed, particularly before small claims courts. However, multiple, complex legal issues do not lend themselves to litigation in person. The only responsible advice that Members of another place can give in such cases is, “You’ve really got to go to a decent solicitor who understands this kind of work”—and, if you are a really daring MP, you might discriminate among the solicitors in your constituency and recommend someone really competent in the hope that others do not find out what you have said.

My reason for supporting this amendment is founded in the sympathy that I have for my noble friend the Minister. I share the view that there is a great deal of waste in legal aid and that steps can be taken to reduce legal aid in many areas. I suspect that almost every Member of your Lordships’ House believes that. However, the list of people potentially affected in this amendment is very realistic. It sets out those very people and groups who are likely to be the most adversely and unfairly damaged by these reductions.

I would have expected the Government, in setting out legislation to cut legal aid, to do the work that is implicit in this amendment. I have looked through the notes on this draft legislation and everything that has come from the Government, and I have seen no evidence of any such assessment being carried out. I have not yet read anything but a summary of the King’s College London report, but if the headlines fairly represent what the report says, they are cause for alarm. It has done the work that the Government should have done and revealed that the savings may not be there at all in certain areas, not least, critically, in clinical negligence cases, which are of particular concern to me.

I cannot see that it would be anything other than responsible for the Government to carry out the work set out in this amendment. I would ordinarily have expected them to do so to justify the cuts that they are proposing to make to legal aid. For those reasons, I feel that it is right to support at least the aims and principles of this amendment.

[Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton]

My Lords, I have listened carefully to people speaking in your Lordships’ House who have a much greater knowledge of the legal system than I do. I look to the Minister to answer two questions. Will it work in terms of the savings; and is it right in the impact that it will have on vulnerable people?

I bring my knowledge from a background of working with people in local government, as do many of your Lordships. In particular, I know that the groups who have been identified as being vulnerable have a fear of officialdom and official settings. I cannot be the only Member of your Lordships’ House who has had to explain to someone how to vote. Someone who has decided for the first time in their life—in their 20s or 30s—that they wish to vote might be frightened of looking foolish by going in the wrong way or doing the wrong thing. I have had constituents who passionately supported their local school during a time of falling rolls, when school provision had to be rationalised. Some of those parents would not go to a public meeting in the school because they did not know how to speak in public. They did not wish to be embarrassed.

Speaking for myself, I was overwhelmed by Preston town hall—now Preston city hall—when I went in for the first time, prior to becoming a councillor. I was overwhelmed by County Hall and thought I would get lost and not know my way around. I ask all noble Lords to believe me because this is true. I was overwhelmed by being on the Committee of the Regions and thought I might get so lost in the Brussels buildings that I would never come back. The Council of Europe was a maze of places; I could have ended up in the Parliamentary Assembly instead of the Committee of the Regions there. Your Lordships’ House was daunting beyond belief. I know that for those noble Lords who had been in another place it was not daunting. They were just coming to the other end of the same building and felt at home, but I did not. I know from talking to people all around the House that I was not the only one who was quaking at my introduction. My five siblings came to watch, partly out of loyalty but also for the joy of watching their big sister Josie being overwhelmed and frightened of doing something. That appealed to them even more than the delight of seeing what was happening.

As I have listened to this debate, it seems to me that there is a misunderstanding about whether people can represent themselves in court, or will even dare to try, when a vital matter in their lives is at stake. That worries me. The Minister has been praised by some likely and, occasionally, unlikely sources. All I ask him for is honesty. Before this Bill goes through Report stage, I want to know that those vulnerable people who I know and he knows will not be further disadvantaged by the Government’s proposals. If, against all the odds, those people are to pay the price, I will have to be convinced that the price they will pay will meet an economic necessity and not just spread the debt into other departments.

Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

Debate between Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton and Lord Carlile of Berriew

Wednesday 29th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Carlile of Berriew]

My Lords, I am very grateful for the customarily courteous spirit in which this debate has been conducted. It has been a fine illustration of the law of unintended consequences. Sitting behind my noble friend Lord Howard of Lympne, I watched the noble Baroness, Lady Farrington, casting a halo like a frisbee across the Chamber, and I now see it metaphorically sitting above my noble friend’s pate.

[Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton]

My Lords, for the record, I think the noble Lord, Lord Howard of Lympne, would agree that I never ever attributed sainthood to him; I just admitted that sometimes he was right.

[Lord Carlile of Berriew]

I hope my noble friend will excuse me if I say that he has never been a particularly modest man, so he probably saw it as a little bit of sainthood flying across the Chamber. It takes one to know one.

I thank the Minister for the spirit in which she responded to this debate. The noble Lord, Lord Beecham, suggested that I might have shown three qualities—eloquence, wit and seduction. I will not say which one I failed on this afternoon but plainly it is at least one of them although not, I hope, all three.

As a Liberal—I use that term with a capital L and without any suffixes—I regret that the Labour Party still appears wedded to a form of democracy that I find strange; what I call the democratic principle of appointment. I do not believe there is anything in the argument that people who are directly elected will perform less independently than those who have been appointed. One of the things that elected people experience, as all my noble friends who were Members of another place know, is a great deal of pressure from their electorates. That applies to the Minister, too, who was a distinguished Member of the other place. I am dubious about that argument.

As to the likelihood of electing a mere slate of party hacks, I simply ask the noble Lord—this might not be a commendation but just a fact—to look at Middlesbrough, Hartlepool and Doncaster. He will see that elections are not always as predictable as you think if they involve a specific issue.

I simply and kindly remind my much admired friend the noble Lord, Lord Elystan-Morgan, that in the days when he was a Labour MP for a West Wales seat, the appointment of Labour councillors to police authorities had about as much to do with democracy as the popping of a champagne cork and was seen as something of a scandal from time to time throughout Wales. I therefore do not accept that the tripartite principle of which he spoke has always been an illustration of good practice.

However, I recognise when I have lost a case. I can see that it would be unhelpful to the House to press this amendment to a Division. Some valuable issues have been raised and I beg leave, on that basis, to withdraw my amendment.

Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

Debate between Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton and Lord Carlile of Berriew

Wednesday 11th May 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Carlile of Berriew]

I am puzzled, even in the context of this place, by the procedure being followed at present. Were we debating the amendment in the normal circumstances that many of us, at least, anticipated on the government side, I would oppose it because, as I said earlier, I support the view that we should have democratic accountability for police forces, although my preference is for elected police authorities. I am very disappointed that we cannot debate that issue as a result of pre-emption. That might have been an intelligent debate on a subject with some empirical evidence on which the House could have offered some wisdom to the Government. Indeed, I was beginning to feel a little like Baldrick, because I thought that I had come up with a cunning plan and, rather like Baldrick, had not anticipated that it might be effective on the odd occasion.

This debate reminds me of the childhood poem that starts, “I met a man upon the stair”. The man is the elected police commissioner but he is not there because, in reality, he has just been removed from the Bill by the vote. To put it another way, it is like the Mad Hatter’s tea party without either the Mad Hatter or the tea. I urge my noble friend Lady Hamwee to draw stumps in some way on this group of amendments so that we can in due course have a proper debate on the proper predicate. The predicate for the whole series of amendments that follows is that Clause 1(1) has been agreed.

[Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton]

The noble Lord will remember that the final line of the poem is, “I wish that man would go away”.