Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

Baroness Finlay of Llandaff Excerpts

Wednesday 7th March 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Masham of Ilton]

My Lords, in supporting the amendments, I just want to say that clinical negligence is such an important matter. I am told that one in 10 people can have a problem with clinical negligence. That should not happen. Much more care should be taken in patient safety. If there are cases of negligence, the health authorities have their own lawyers. If there is no legal aid for the patient, it means that there is not a level playing field. After all, it is all taxpayers’ money.

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff]

My Lords, I sense that the House is getting to the point where this debate needs to draw to a close, so I will not go over the points that I was going to make at length, except to point out that there is a moral case and a financial case for both the first two amendments in the group. The moral case is that people are particularly vulnerable when they are in the hands of clinicians, their vulnerability being the reason that they need a clinical intervention. Therefore, closing down access to justice or compensation when things go awry seems particularly wrong.

I have a further point to make on allowing clinical negligence to come back into scope. The financial arguments, as already laid out by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd of Berwick, and in the report of King’s College London, indicate that on financial grounds alone both these amendments make sense. To repeat the figures given by my noble friend Lord Wigley, the cost to the public purse is estimated to be £28.5 million, as opposed to the £10.5 million that the Ministry of Justice hopes to save by this measure. We have heard a lot about the need to save money.

There could be unintended consequences from this calculation of increased, not decreased, expenditure. The intention behind the Government’s amendments is to be welcomed but I fear that there will be complications in, for example, trying to work out the dates of a pregnancy if a scan is not done in the first trimester. Women’s periods are notoriously unreliable as a method of establishing dates in a pregnancy, and arguments about whether it is one day or another will make life extremely difficult.

I end by pointing out that in his report Lord Justice Jackson said that of all the proposed cutbacks in legal aid, the removal of legal aid in relation to clinical negligence was the most unfortunate. He went on to state that if—in his view, wrongly—legal aid for clinical negligence was cut, then removing legal aid for expert reports would not make sound sense.

[Lord Newton of Braintree]

My Lords, I wonder whether I might be allowed to intervene from this Front Bench position without people feeling that I have fallen victim to delusions of grandeur of one kind or another.

I wish to make three points. First, I support the general thrust of the arguments that have been put forward by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd, the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, and my noble friend Lady Eaton. I shall not elaborate but I think that they have made excellent points which need to be considered.

The second is to build on what was said by my noble friend Lord Cormack and, even more so, by the noble Baroness, Lady Mallalieu, about one striking aspect of the speech of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd, and indeed the note he had sent me. Had I had the temerity to intervene in the winding-up of the previous debate or had I wished to elongate my speech in that debate, I would have said that those of us who were supporting it were not hell-bent on increasing the deficit and raising the debt. The key point is that we just do not believe the Government’s figures. No one outside the Government believes that savings are going to be made on the scale that the Government claim, and in many cases we think that the deficit is going to be increased. We now have this concrete example of where the figures are wrong, and I hope that the House will bear that in mind.

Finally, one thing that sticks in my mind from this whole exercise is a seminar at which we heard from someone who had been severely damaged by clinical negligence, along with his wife. Victory in that case had enabled the wife to go on looking after the man and for him to go on having as normal a life as possible in a severely disabled state. I just ask myself how much the state saved in that one case, where the husband and wife would not otherwise have been able to go on in those circumstances. How much had been saved in terms of many years of residential care or much more extensive support from the social services department? In my view, these are the things that have not been factored into some of these calculations, and there are many others. Although not strictly related to this amendment, every child taken into care costs £36,000 a year. These are the costs that have not been factored in. I think that we are owed some better answers than we have had so far, and I hope, without much expectation, that we will get some better answers tonight.