Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

Debate between Lord Thomas of Gresford and Baroness Anelay of St Johns

Wednesday 1st February 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Thomas of Gresford]

My Lords, Part 2 of the Bill has its complexities, but all sides are agreed on two principles.

[Baroness Anelay of St Johns]

My Lords, I am aware that the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford, is hesitating so that he may have the Minister’s ear.

[Lord Thomas of Gresford]

All sides are agreed on two principles—access to justice must be maintained and undue cost must be squeezed out of civil litigation. The issue is what the best framework is for achieving these ends. Unlike with Part 1 of the Bill, public money is not directly involved in supporting the litigation that we are referring to in Part 2.

All sides recognise the unforeseen and unintended consequences of the Access to Justice Act 1999, which threw the burden of the success fee and the ATE insurance premium on to losing defendants and removed from the claimant any interest in the amount of the success fees and premiums that they were only theoretically obliged to pay. Save for the recent changes introducing fixed fees in Road Traffic Act litigation, lawyers have been able to charge 100 per cent success fees, whether or not they undertake other, riskier cases. Insurers have fixed levels of premiums with which not even the costs judges on taxation are able or willing to quarrel.

This policy may have helped claimants by allowing them to retain the full amount of the damages awarded to them. However, the removal of the restraint of competition as to the size of success fees and ATE premiums has put an undue burden of fourfold cost on defendant insurers. Ultimately, this is not in the public interest, because insurers take their profit and pass the burden on in increased premiums for motoring, household, employers and public liability insurance. Self-insured large companies and public bodies such as the NHS and public authorities that are funded from the public purse generally carry the burden themselves.

The Bill proposes to shift the burden. The claimant will pay the success fee, which will be limited to 25 per cent of his damages for pain, suffering and loss of amenity and loss of earnings and expense to the date of trial. He will also carry the burden of the ATE premium to an amount that is not limited. The champagne corks will indeed be popping in the City by relieved liability insurers and in NHS trusts, town halls and board rooms all over the country. If these defendants win, all their own costs will be paid by the ATE insurers—assuming, of course, that there is still an ATE market and that the premium is affordable—unless a regime of one-way cost shifting that I talked about on Monday last is introduced at the same time, which will require defendants, win or lose, to pay their own costs.

The Jackson report, which sets out all the consultations that Lord Justice Jackson undertook, demonstrates that insurers and public bodies are up for it and accept that one-way cost-shifting, a system that has operated in legal aid cases since 1949, is a fair price for removing from them their present liability for uncontrolled success fees and uncontrolled “after the event” premiums. If one-way cost-shifting is introduced, at a stroke a claimant will lose the fear of having to pay the defendant’s costs if he loses the case, costs that might ruin him and remove the roof from over his head. At a stroke, the “after the event” insurance premium, which is currently in place largely to cover the defendant’s costs, will be savagely cut back. A claimant will have to cover only the risk that if he loses he will be responsible not for the defendant’s costs but for his own disbursements, court fees, expert and medical fees. Just as it is conceivable that in competing for business a solicitor might advertise that he will not charge a success fee, a solicitor with a large standard practice might well be prepared to absorb disbursements in the cases that he loses. We shall have to see whether that happens.

All this is by way of introduction to my amendments, which deal with a discrete area of litigation—environmental law, involving public law and private claims and the tort of nuisance. Public law cases are judicial review claims brought mainly by individuals concerned by inappropriate development—for instance, whether planning permission has made proper allowance for the effect on local flora and fauna by a particular development or whether a waste dump is in the right place. Private nuisance has enjoyed a real renaissance through the help of independent solicitors since the access to justice scheme came into being. A private nuisance is an interference to land or to rights associated with land caused by the unreasonable conduct of the defender. It is the last resort for local residents who need injunctive relief from a polluter who will not run his enterprise with proper concern for his neighbours, and where the regulator is unable or unwilling to take steps to abate the problem.

I am indebted to Stephen Hockman, Queen's Counsel, a former chairman of the Bar, Stephen Tromans, Queen's Counsel, named as environment/planning Silk of the Year at the Chambers Bar Awards 2011, and Gordon Wignall, a barrister specialising in nuisance cases and editor of the third edition of the Law Society’s Guide to Conditional Fees. I have circulated copies of their joint opinion on the impact of the Aarhus convention on costs and funding rules that are applicable in environmental cases.

The Aarhus convention is concerned with access to justice in environmental matters and was ratified by the United Kingdom in February 2005 at the same time that it was ratified by the European Community. The relevant text is set out in the opinion, but the effect is that the United Kingdom is bound to provide “adequate and effective remedies” in this area,

“including injunctive relief as appropriate, and be fair, equitable, timely and not prohibitively expensive”.

The convention applies both to judicial review claims in the administrative court and to private law actions in nuisance. The Supreme Court, in a recent case, has referred the question as to the test to be applied in order to determine whether proceedings are “prohibitively expensive” to the European Court of Justice. In one case that is quoted in the opinion, for example, a defendant’s costs amounted to well over £3 million. Is that prohibitively expensive?

Since the Minister and others already have a copy of the full opinion, I will simply put the conclusions of the learned counsel on the public record. First, the current costs rules run contrary to the international treaty obligations of the United Kingdom, which the United Kingdom voluntarily accepted. Problems arise largely out of the insistence on the “costs follow the event” rule, which tends to lead to inconsistency with the aims of participating in environmental justice and results in a claimant’s liability to pay prohibitively expensive costs.

Secondly, the compliance committee’s last deliberation in the ClientEarth case required the United Kingdom to review its costs rules and recommended rectification. Thirdly, two detailed reviews relevant to environmental proceedings in England and Wales have subsequently been undertaken and presided over by members of the Court of Appeal. The learned counsel are referring to the Jackson report, which we have been discussing, and to the report of Lord Justice Sullivan on access to environmental justice. These have been endorsed by the senior judiciary, and the primary recommendation was that the use of qualified one-way cost-shifting in environmental cases would have a dramatic inroad into the “costs follow the event” principle.

Fourthly, by withdrawing the recovery of “after the event” premiums, the size of which cannot be met by claimants or their legal representatives, without providing at the same time for one-way cost shifting as a replacement in environmental claims, the Government have elected to retreat from the full proposals of the Jackson report and the Sullivan report, which were conducted by those eminent Lords Justices. Fifthly, the consequence is that the United Kingdom, already in breach of its convention obligations, is diverging from rather converging with its own environmental expectations and those of the international community.

Sixthly, the further consequence is that claimants who wish to protect the environment and participate in environmental justice are even less likely to be able to do so than at present. This is predominantly because of the risk of incurring a liability for defendant’s costs that may well be prohibitively and grossly expensive in any event, but also because of the uncertainty that claimants face about their liability for those costs, which under the Government’s proposals will be known only once the litigation, whether public or private, has been concluded.

Claimants in environmental cases do not want damages; they want relief from the consequence of poor decision-making by public bodies or protection from the degradation of their environment. Even in multiparty actions, damages-based agreements are not a solution. My amendments would enable the Government to honour their international environmental obligations rather than turn their back upon them.

Amendment 147 would provide in subsection (2A) that in an environmental claim the losing defendant would pay the premium in respect of disbursements by way of fees for expert reports paid by the claimant. In subsection (2B), the losing defendant would pay the premium on the costs insurance policy if he had agreed to do so prior to the commencement of the proceedings. There are occasions when a defendant will agree to pay the claimant’s premium for “after the event” insurance whether he wins or loses, because if the defendants succeed then they will get all their costs from the ATE insurers.

Amendment 150 defines “environmental claim” by the same definition as is contained in the Aarhus convention. The use of this definition would ensure that only nuisance cases that were truly environmental in nature would be within the scope of my amendment. Insurance recovery claims and private nuisance—for tree-root subsidence, for instance—would not get the amendment of the amendment.

Amendment 157 would introduce qualified one-way cost-shifting in both environmental claims and other claims. The amendment was drafted before I had refined my own views, which I explained at small length on Monday last on this topic. The word “unreasonably” therefore appears in the amendment but I repeat my objections to the vagueness of the word “unreasonable” and reiterate the necessity for clarity by expanding what is unreasonable, as Lord Justice Jackson did, into the familiar expressions of “fraud”, “frivolous and vexatious conduct” and “abuse of the process of the court”.

Why should we single out environmental law for different treatment from other areas of litigation? Essentially, I am not. In the amendments I am arguing for one-way cost-shifting as a precondition for change and for the premium for cover for disbursements—a far lesser amount than the current premiums recovered against the potential defendant’s cost liabilities—to be recovered from the losing defendant. That is very similar to what I was saying on Monday, when I suggested that there are positive benefits in dividing liability for these lesser premiums between the claimant and the defendant in a staged way. In any event, the issue is far more urgent in environmental cases because of our obligation to comply with the Aarhus convention.

A tidy mind might try to bring every aspect of litigation into one structure, one piece of architecture—the word that the Minister used on Monday—but litigation is not like that. Time and again the Jackson report emphasises that one size does not fit all. I quote from page 44:

“many submissions during the Costs Review have emphasised that ‘one size does not fit all’. The Bar Council, for example, states: ‘What is abundantly clear, from Jackson LJ’s Preliminary Report and from the Bar Council’s review, is that “One size does not fit all.” Particular types of litigation give rise to particular issues, be they funding issues, case management issues or otherwise”.

That is a recurring theme in the Jackson report and every practising lawyer will agree.