Litigation Friends

Debate between Anne Main and John Hemming

Wednesday 21st March 2012 Westminster Hall

[John Hemming (Birmingham, Yardley) (LD)]

I thank Mr Speaker for allowing this debate.

If somebody is in an accident and ends up in a coma, they need a litigation friend to instruct a solicitor to sue for damages. A litigation friend, or next friend, is very different from a Mackenzie friend. A litigation friend makes decisions for the person who does not have capacity. If somebody is not in a coma, there is a question of what threshold is required before appointing such a litigation friend or guardian. Thomas Hammarberg, the Council of Europe’s commissioner for human rights, recently stated:

“Persons with intellectual and psycho-social disabilities are today routinely placed under a guardianship regime in several European countries—they are deprived of their ‘legal capacity’. In the eyes of the law they are seen as non-persons and their decisions have no legal relevance. This policy violates agreed human rights standards.”

He refers to the UN convention on the rights of persons with disabilities of 2006.

In England and Wales, the situation is materially worse, primarily because secrecy of the judicial system has allowed widespread malpractice to develop, as revealed last week by Professor Jane Ireland’s report on psychological expert reports. A good example of that is Rachel Pullen’s case, which is currently grinding through the Strasbourg court. Her daughter was removed and adopted, although there were no hearings at which any of the evidence was challenged, because the psychologist appointed to assess her deemed her too stupid to instruct a solicitor. That was clearly not true, as was determined by a later psychological report. However, it was too late. The psychologist said she was incapable of instructing a solicitor. The Official Solicitor came in as her litigation friend and conceded the case against her on paper and there was no hearing. At her appeal, I made two important points for which the court criticised me.

My first point was that the system allows the local authority to veto the appointment of an expert, thus making the expert financially beholden to the local authority. Professor Ireland’s report revealed that the overwhelming majority of experts in the family courts made most, if not all, their income from writing expert reports. Parents only instruct an expert once, but the local authority does so continually. That creates a complacent environment in which experts frequently write the report the local authority would wish to see—well, those experts who drive Ferraris, Porsches and Formula 1 motor cars do anyway.

My second point referred to a letter from the Official Solicitor to Rosleys solicitors. I expressed the view that the letter was created at a later stage and inserted in the file. It was obvious from the letter that whoever did that did not have access to Rosleys office, as there was no received stamp on it, no headed paper was used for its purported sending out, its address format was unusual and the date of receipt and purported posting out was impossible. The court decided that my mentioning those facts was not providing evidence and was critical of my claim. I stand by my claim, and I believe that what I have just said is indeed evidence of forgery. Real problems remain with the appointment of litigation friends. The Rosleys letter was supposed to explain to someone that the Official Solicitor had been appointed as their litigation friend, which is why the letter was so important.

Given the secrecy of the system, people are not generally aware of how the process works. Lee Gilliland, for example, was evicted without notice because he had the Official Solicitor appointed to defend his probate case. The Official Solicitor did not warn him that he was due to be evicted. The Official Solicitor was appointed on the say-so of his general practitioner, Dr Hoyte, who said:

“He has grievances and fixed ideation about many official bodies.”

I find it odd that that is relevant to his having legal capacity. In my view, the fact that someone has a grievance about an official body does not warrant their being turned into a non-person and prevented from making decisions.

The big problem for anyone for whom the Official Solicitor has been appointed is finding any way to challenge such a decision. Most firms of solicitors simply refuse to act for someone without litigation capacity. The civil procedure rules do not really allow people to challenge the appointment of a litigation friend. CPR rule 21.9 states:

“(2) Where a protected party regains or acquires capacity to conduct the proceedings, the litigation friend’s appointment continues until it is ended by court order.”

The assumption is that litigation friends cannot be wrongly appointed. In Professor Ireland’s review of 126 court bundles, she found that two thirds of the reports were “poor” or “very poor”—84 cases where, if the judge relied upon the report, really the decision should be quashed. That raises questions.

England and Wales do not have the facility for a proper review of expert evidence. We do not have the Daubert process that is used in the USA. Any solicitor appointed to act on behalf of a protected party is in danger of being subject to a conflict of interest. Let me mention the case of Anthony Neil Barker, whose website is www.neebert.net. He has written me long, detailed e-mails about how he has regained his capacity, but cannot escape from the Court of Protection. I have some difficulty understanding how that can happen, but when it involves large sums of money, it is not surprising. It is in the solicitor’s interest to keep him as a non-person, as the solicitor can then charge him for things.

[Mrs Anne Main (in the Chair)]

Order. Is the hon. Gentleman talking about a case that is no longer active in the UK courts?

[John Hemming]

In this case, there may be activity, but I am referring to things that have happened in the past. I discussed the matter previously with the Clerk, and I am being careful not to refer to any decisions that are coming before the court.

[Mrs Anne Main (in the Chair)]

I thank the hon. Gentleman.

[John Hemming]

Noreen Akhtar is a constituent of mine, whom I have been refused permission to meet. She is a secret prisoner. Experts have determined that she does not have the mental capacity to decide where she lives. I have seen the expert reports, and they look as unreliable as many of the other reports referred to.

Husan Pari has now left the country to get away from the system that made her a non-person. The psychologist who interviewed her through an interpreter said that she was a non-person. A psychologist who later interviewed her in her own language was clear that she did have mental capacity.

The Official Solicitor’s office is an unaccountable place. He has told me that he is not accountable to Parliament on the basis of individual cases. Furthermore, he is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act, or at least not within this area, but he is subject to it in other areas of his activity. Instead, the Official Solicitor is accountable to individual secret court hearings. That really is not good enough. There must be some accountability beyond a few people in suits who have a common interest in concealing malpractice. Hon. Members need to read Professor Ireland’s report to find out about that.

An interesting additional function of the Official Solicitor is to deal with people imprisoned for contempt of court. Deborah Paul is currently serving a one-year sentence in Holloway prison for contempt of court, as part of a private family law case that has turned public. The civil procedure rules strictly forbid people being imprisoned in secret. However, it was revealed in Hammerton v. Hammerton that people are imprisoned with reporting restrictions. I wonder who is protecting Deborah Paul’s rights. When I wrote to the Official Solicitor about his duty to protect the interests of contemnors, he gave me no confidence that he was doing anything. The recent striking off of Dr Ruth Coppard and the attempt by Dr George Hibbert to remove himself from the General Medical Council practising register should really ring alarm bells.

Our family legal system is founded on expert opinion. However, these foundations appear to be more like quicksand. The secrecy in family court hearings has allowed a culture of complacency to develop. Although procedures such as a modified Daubert procedure would enable improvements, secrecy creates a culture that tolerates malpractice. Secrecy in family court hearings has led to broader unaccountability in the appointment of litigation friends and their management of decision making.

I was quite surprised when Professor Ireland’s excellent report on the quality of psychological expert opinion was produced, not because I did not know that this was happening, but because the report was part-funded by the Family Justice Council. However, I was not surprised that, although the report was ready for release in September 2011, it was released six months later. There are people who would like to sweep the contents of the report under the carpet.

I will not quote a lot from the report. Anyone who is really interested in justice in our secret courts should simply read it.

Professor Ireland and Professor John Beaumont, who is from the same university, have produced proposals for a modified Daubert procedure, but that is only a partial solution. Secret courts are unreliable courts. What is needed is less secrecy. Anonymous reports by parties to proceedings should not be subject to any constraints. There must be a facility, potentially via the Information Commissioner, to produce fully public reports.

Justice is important, and it is clear that the system is very unreliable. It is also clear that Parliament needs to resuscitate its powers of investigating individual cases. It is too easy for authorities to refuse to provide information. In the Goder case, where a litigation friend was appointed and the daughter, Yvonne Goder, was imprisoned, probably in secret, there is an allegation that the money from three houses was stolen. Even taking the issue through to the legal ombudsman has not identified what happened to the money. Tracking payments is quite easy and accounts can be provided. However, if a case gets to the legal ombudsman without accounts, I am worried about whether the regulatory system is working properly.

The question always is, quis custodiet ipsos custodes? In this case, who is regulating the regulators? The answer has to be Parliament. Parliament needs to establish a small inquiries committee to find answers where none are forthcoming. Where litigation friends are appointed in secret hearings based upon expert evidence that is known to be systemically unreliable in three courts and about which there is no other systemic research, it is very difficult to find out what is happening in a very murky system. We know that large sums of money are being paid, but we are unsure what for and whether that is in the interests of those people for whom the money is held.

There is always a question about who is appointed as a litigation friend. The Official Solicitor is supposed to be a last resort, but seems to me to be the first choice in many instances. I tried to use judicial review through a limited company to find out what was happening with one secret prisoner—Matthew Hawkesworth—but got nowhere, and the court decided to punish me for the effrontery of challenging the system by awarding costs against me personally, as well as against the limited company. That is one reason why judicial review is an insufficient remedy for a quite significant, wide-ranging problem.

Some solutions to the problem therefore rest with Parliament, rather than with the Government, but they do need to review the situation. I have always spoken about how our judicial system is not compliant with the European Union standards as applied to Croatia, and I will not repeat that in my speech. The Government must take such things seriously.

I have rattled through my speech reasonably quickly. The Minister is well aware of my concerns, because I have been concerned about this matter for a long time. One great difficulty in respect of how our constitution operates is that we have developed an approach whereby Parliament is regarded primarily as a body holding the Executive to account, but the courts—the judicial estate of the constitution—are held to account also through public consideration of their decision making, which then influences Parliament. Parliament then makes decisions and guides what happens if any rules need to be changed, and they clearly need to be changed in a number of situations.

One of the reasons why I have ended up helping to get rid of the Official Solicitor, as people might put it, or to remove their litigation friend is that it is almost impossible to find a way of doing so. People who are often quite bright go around phoning up firms of solicitors and saying, “Oh, the Official Solicitor is acting for me,” and the firms reply, “Well, we can’t deal with you.” Even then, there is still the matter of legal aid.

I tend to get involved because people must be aware of my concerns about how the litigation friend system operates and come to me. I have talked to other hon. Members who have encountered difficult situations as well, but people often get excited about the being made into a non-person thing. I do not blame them for that, but they get quite angry, and when they present themselves to other hon. Members, they do so in quite an angry state, yet that is in part because the system is simply not responding to them. As described by Thomas Hammarberg, they are treated as non-persons and their decisions have no legal force.

I have spent some time studying the historical records of Parliament, which are interesting and available in the Library. What Parliament used to do more readily, because people came with casework or whatever, was to establish small committees of inquiry into issues that might have developed because they got stuck and could go no further. Parliament needs to have a willingness to establish a committee of inquiry just to find out the facts. The House of Commons may be a court, but, constitutionally, it would be wrong to revert to taking decisions that have legal force on individual cases. What about investigation, however, and that question of who is regulating the regulators? How do we manage the process when a regulatory system goes wrong? In a limited number of cases—we would not want to overwhelm ourselves with work—Parliament has the power to find out what is going on.

To take the case of the three houses, there is clear evidence of some sort of fraud, and finding out what fraud has occurred is critical. One difficulty, as in the recent Asian royal family case, is that sometimes the regulators or the police will steer clear of an issue. Interestingly, in that case, which relates to the funding of al-Qaeda, the Australian police are willing to investigate, whereas I am told that the UK police are not. I do not have that in writing, but I shall pursue it with the Government if I do so.

I leave the Minister a reasonable amount of time to respond. Some serious issues are going on and have been for some time. With Professor Ireland’s report and the recent regulatory action in respect of Dr Ruth Coppard and Dr George Hibbert, it is becoming more obvious that the problem is serious. I am interested in what the Government have to say.