Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

Lord Lester of Herne Hill Excerpts

Monday 30th January 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Beecham]

My Lords, I reassure the noble Lord, Lord Newton, that this is a group of probing amendments to see which, if any, the Government might feel on reflection ought to be accepted and the scope of the current scheme in effect retained. Clearly, the answer has not been one to encourage optimism on this side of the House, but there are cases, particularly the last one to which the noble and learned Lord referred, where the Government are trying, as so often, to have it both ways.

In previous debates we have heard trade unions invoked as a source of advice and support for their members once legal aid goes. This is an area in which trade unions have for a long time been active in promoting the interests of their members. They will now lose that benefit. In my view, there is a strong case for the Government to look again at the position. I accept that they want organisations such as trade unions to support their members in the field of legal advice, but if so, they ought to endeavour to facilitate that, not at the Government's expense but by retaining success fees and the self-insurance element that the noble and learned Lord proposes to remove.

Asbestosis is probably the most acute of the diseases involved, and when we will come to a debate on it I will strongly support the noble Lord, Lord Alton. It is sometimes forgotten that it is not just direct exposure to asbestos that causes problems and has resulted in litigation but indirect exposure. There have been cases in which wives dealing with laundry and clothes that have been contaminated with asbestos fibres have themselves suffered injury. They have eventually succeeded in obtaining compensation, but that is an illustration of the kind of difficulty and complexity that can arise. There may well be other cases. Every few years, a new condition reaches the courts. Asbestosis was one; miners’ lung disease, pneumoconiosis, was another; and there are others. Although it is certainly true that, as the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, pointed out, some lawyers rather exploited the position in some of those cases involving minters, on the other hand many lawyers took these cases on over a very long period at considerable risk to themselves before obtaining settlements. That eventually led to the sensible outcome of a national scheme that determined a scale of damages and, for that matter, the scale of costs. There will be other cases. One imagines that cases may arise over time in the nuclear industry. There have already been some in which radiation has caused damage. I hope that at the very least the Government will look at those cases sympathetically.

The noble and learned Lord referred again to the number of cases that are being pursued. However, I remind him of the figures that I quoted in the first debate: the very detailed analysis of 69,000 cases showed that a third would simply not have been brought under the proposals presently in the Bill. A significant proportion of cases would therefore be pursued, many of them no doubt successfully although others not.

If we are still in the business of trying to promote access to justice by spreading the risk so that it is not always against lawyers’ interests to run cases with a lesser probability of success, that is something that the system should encourage. The fear is certainly that cases with less than a 75 per cent chance of success will just not reach the courts. A very respected firm, Thompsons, which acts for a number of trade unions, indicates that at the moment it takes cases with a risk level as low as 50 per cent, and it cannot see how it could conceivably do that in the future. Yet some of the very cases that we have been talking about involving asbestosis, pneumoconiosis and so on started off with a probable success rate of 50 per cent at best and arguably even worse. If we are not to close the door on emerging cases of that kind or on cases with perhaps a two-thirds chance of success, we have to have a balance to which success fees can contribute. The Opposition’s case is that that ought not to be simply a matter for successful defendants; it ought to be a collective insurance risk. That is the position that we seek to get to.

[Lord Lester of Herne Hill]

I am very grateful to the noble Lord; I had not intended to intervene. Does he agree that in the public interest we ought to be concerned not only with securing a fair balance between claimants and defendants but with being quite clear that there must be adequate safeguards against abuse by members of the legal profession in relation to conditional fee agreements and success fees? I have encountered abuses, for example in the equal pay area, where claimants’ lawyers have insisted that in cases against public authorities the women concerned should enter into binding agreements to ensure that a cut from the damages for equal pay for these poorly paid women goes to the lawyers and that no individual settlements are made without the consent of the lawyers. Should we not be very concerned about those kinds of things and about driving up the level of unnecessary litigation?

[Lord Beecham]

I entirely agree with that and I think that there ought to be a regime for the determination of the size of the success fee in any event. If a case is brought, that matter should be capable of being decided by the court. The noble Lord’s point is one which unfortunately will see damages being taken willy-nilly precisely from claimants in that category. They will not have the opportunity of getting the success fee paid by the other side. In a sense the noble Lord is supporting the case I am making. I entirely agree that members at both ends of the legal profession need to be monitored and that the courts ought to be taking a more positive role both in case management, as I indicated in the first debate, and in the assessment of what is an appropriate success fee. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

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I am sorry to have taken up so much of the Committee’s time on these important amendments. They could, of course, have been split into different groups, but perhaps it is right that they have not been. I hope that the Government will listen carefully to what has been said in this group. I beg to move.

[Lord Lester of Herne Hill]

I shall just say something about Amendment 124 in relation to defamation and privacy. This could take hours of a separate debate, but I am going to try to be extremely brief. As the noble Lord, Lord Bach, has indicated, this has to be seen in the context of a defamation Bill that has not yet been published. We have had my Private Member's Bill, a government draft Bill and consultation, and I hope very much that there will be an actual Bill in the Queen’s Speech in the next Session.

I suggest that it is perhaps not appropriate to be moving amendments at this stage so far as costs and insurance are concerned until one knows the substance of the actual defamation Bill. I take it—and the my noble friend the Minister will slap me down if I say something that he strongly disagrees with—to be one of the objects of the reform of defamation law to secure a fair balance between the rights of claimants and the rights of defendants; and between the fundamental right of claimants to vindicate their reputation and their right to personal privacy on the one hand and the right of defendants to freedom of expression on the other. Claimants, so far as libel is concerned, have tended to be the rich and the wealthy, not always, but mainly. The rich and the wealthy, whose lawyers are also rich and wealthy, have abused their power in the past, as the previous Justice Secretary, the right honourable Jack Straw, recognised when he introduced his proposals about capping success fees and conditional fee agreements in this area. They have abused their power by running up enormous legal costs, even in cases where there was no real defence, with the result that the defendant, normally a regional or national newspaper, was faced with a situation where the damages might be £20,000, but the legal costs might be £250,000. It was that abuse that led the European Court of Human Rights in the Mirror Group case to indicate that that had a serious and unnecessary chilling effect on the freedom of speech of publishers. I emphasise that.

The second thing I want to emphasise is that just as claimants have tended to be rich and powerful, although one wishes that the poor would also be able to vindicate their reputations, defendants are not always rich and powerful national newspapers. They may be the citizen critic accusing a public authority of abusing its power, an NGO or a small regional newspaper with very little funds to meet legal costs. I take it to be an objective of the defamation Bill to reduce the costs of litigation and to discourage litigation in the area of reputation and privacy by encouraging the use of lower courts, say county courts, not just the High Court, focusing on alternative dispute resolution and finding ways of securing equality of arms, to use the European phrase, between the parties where there is inequality of arms at the moment. All that needs to be tackled in the context of a future defamation Bill, when we can look at procedures and costs in relation to those reforms which must be designed to secure a fair balance, not a charter for rich newspapers or rich claimants. I think that until we know the Government’s final thinking on this and are able to debate it, it is premature to try to adjust the costs and insurance provisions of this Bill in order to try to tackle the kind of issues that I have inadequately summarised.

[Lord Prescott]

My Lords, I apologise for missing the first few minutes of this debate. The debate I listened to earlier on Clause 43 showed that there is a great deal of feeling about an injustice being perpetrated here in all forms of the use of no win, no cost. I have been in an interesting situation that I would like to relate to noble Lords as an example of what can happen under these new changes.

At Second Reading, I made it clear that I thought this Bill moved power and resources to the wealthy and more powerful and away from the individual, and that the individual was going to be the victim because they were seeking legal redress. These amendments will make it much more difficult to achieve that. It is really about strengthening the more powerful in our society, particularly in regard to individuals and the press. The evidence is clear in the many examples. They do this by changing the rules of no win, no cost under the 1999 Act and other legislation. Under this Bill, the cost of the insurance to take out these cases and, indeed, the changes in the risk payments, will transfer not from the loser, but from the one who has won the case. If you win the case, you are still going to pay a penalty.

In looking at the circumstances—and I shall refer to my court case on telephone hacking—one can see the fundamental difference. I am talking about individuals who see their rights being breached by the media. For example, under the system we have at the moment, I was awarded £40,000 damages. My solicitor’s costs were about £80,000. That means that I got £40,000, my solicitor got £80,000 and the insurance and the risk were included in that. What we are proposing now is to limit the amount of money paid to lawyers for the risk factor—I shall not go into all the arguments that have been made here—which is how they secure more money to take on more risky cases for more people to get access under this no win, no cost situation.

In my mind, that is straightforward. The damages come to me, they are mine. The lawyers get their full costs. Who carries all these costs? The people who lost the case, the ones who have been phone hacking, who have been breaking the law, which we are all aware of, and who have even been paying the police. In those circumstances, why should they not pay the full penalty? I understand that they quote the Mirror Group case at the European Court of Human Rights. In that case, the costs were high. Why? It has always been the practice of the press to fight until the last minute. If anybody wishes to pursue them with no-win no-fee, they say, “Sue us”. You may well have a case, but they will make you sell your house and everything else before you have sufficient resources. At the end, when you have done all that, they say, “Okay. We’ll concede the case”, and they will offer you some kind of damages. That is the pressure that puts costs up in the courts in these cases.

What would have been the effect if I had pursued my case under these new rules? Believe me, this press is not going to go away; it is still going to be committing the same offences. We have a PCC that is particularly useless and will continue to be unless we make fundamental changes. Anyone listening to the Leveson inquiry must hear that the press has not changed its mind; it is still going to go ahead and do the same things because that is how it sells newspapers. Let us assume I have a complaint of a similar nature against the press. This would mean that I would have to get a no-win no-fee situation. Given that they have already reduced the risk costs, it is highly unlikely that they may find this a risky situation. In fact, when I was complaining in this House and elsewhere about what the press was doing about phone hacking and about Murdoch, I was almost a lonely voice.

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[Lord Martin of Springburn]

My Lords, I support the noble Lord, Lord Bach. I listened with interest to the noble Lord, Lord Lester, and his comments about the rich and famous being able to take cases to court. This is what worries me about the lack of no-win no-fee. I am not concerned about the rich and famous, I am concerned about ordinary men and women, who maybe only once in their life have been defamed by a newspaper. At the Leveson inquiry one former editor said, “If it sounds good or if it sounds like the truth, just lob it in”—just to lob it in for a woman or a man who is living a quiet life is very cruel and hard.

For those of us who have approached newspapers and said, “What you have said about me is wrong”, their first reaction is, “If you don’t like it, write a letter and we will print it in the readers’ column”. How insulting is that, that I or anyone else should then make a contribution to a newspaper—which is usually a nasty newspaper that you would not even have in your home—by putting a letter into their column? That is even the line that they take with the Press Complaints Commission. Everyone knows that when anyone takes up a complaint with the Press Complaints Commission, they are not even looking for money, they are looking for some redress, and that is the first course of action that they take.

Years ago, perhaps in the 1950s, 1960s or 1970s, it used to be the case that if a newspaper printed something that was wrong about you, it was a matter between you and the newspaper. This is not the case nowadays, because when a newspaper prints an allegation, there is a press preview on Sky News or the BBC, where they get some talking heads to chew over what has been said about you that day. That means that even when you are deeply embarrassed about what has gone out, and you have not even had a chance to redress the balance, within hours of that newspaper being published hundreds of thousands of viewers are able to get a look at that newspaper because they are invited to do so by another press organisation.

I note the point that the noble Lord, Lord Lester, has made about local newspapers. When is it that people take offence at a local newspaper? There is maybe the odd individual. But a local newspaper says to itself, “We do not have the resources to involve ourselves in a law suit, so we had better be careful before we go to print”. My local newspaper is the Springburn Evening Times. While there have obviously been people who have taken exception to what it has had to say, I have never known anyone to take it to court, because as an organisation it is careful about what it does.

[Lord Lester of Herne Hill]

Has the noble Lord read the evidence that was given to the Joint Committee on the Draft Defamation Bill by various NGOs and regional newspapers, indicating the ways in which the existing law of libel has a very similar chilling effect on their ability to report and comment on matters of public interest?

[Lord Martin of Springburn]

I have not read the document, but now that the noble Lord has drawn it to my attention, I will. What I am talking about is the experiences that I have had of local newspapers. Of course, they are careful that they do not get involved in any litigation, in the same way as we—as people who have privilege in this Chamber—will be very careful about what we say out in the street, because we know that we would be subject to litigation.

However, the national newspapers are not concerned about being subject to litigation. Some of them are very rich organisations indeed. They know full well, when someone comes along—well, we have covered the rich and famous. Let us take a different situation. We, as a House, encourage people to go into public life. Once you get into public life, you are under the microscope. It may well be that Members of Parliament down the corridor are paid a better salary than your average journeyman or journeywoman—a blue-collar worker, I take it—but they are not paid so well that they can take on some of the people in the media who are vicious and nasty, and are willing to have a go not only at them, but also at their wives and families.

I know that this is about an amendment and therefore I had better not go on for too long about the whole thing. I will say, however, that ordinary men and women should be able to go and, if necessary, take their case to court. I take the noble Lord’s point that if there is a lower court that can handle it, that might be all the better. I will end by saying this: how ordinary can this situation be? An unemployed man in Liverpool, who was a pass-keeper in his local church—the person who does the collection plates and opens the church ready for the service—was accused in a publication of taking money from the collection plate that he put around. His difficulties were so great that he had to get the cheapest bus ticket from Liverpool to London to see a no-win no-fee lawyer to make sure that the balance was redressed. He won. Are we going to say of a man like that, who is unemployed, who was doing his duty in his church—someone who is respected not only by the congregation but by the whole community—and who has an accusation like that made against him, that we cannot allow him to get to court and put his case?