Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

Lord Carlile of Berriew Excerpts

Monday 16th January 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws]

My Lords, I apologise for interrupting the noble and learned Lord, Lord Scott. There is no greater crime than for a barrister to interrupt a judge mid-speech, so I am covered in a white shroud as I appear before him.

I, too, support the noble Lord, Lord Faulks, in this amendment, and in the other amendments. They tend to flush out a rather important question: is it the intention that this is a continuation of the erosion of legal aid, and that the idea of turning it back is never to be considered? Are we talking about the withering on the vine of legal aid? If so, you would not have in mind the opportunity of the Lord Chancellor to reinstate legal aid or to put it back in place as a result of evidence of shortcomings. If the intention is simply to reduce legal aid inexorably, of course you would not bother having that bit as part of the powers of the Lord Chancellor.

The piece of law to which I want to speak is that of unintended consequences. We know that it is only in the experience of the absence of legal aid that we will see its impact. I want to reinforce what others have said, that it will be in the sucking of the sweetie that one will be able to work out whether the consequences are so serious that the Lord Chancellor might want to reinstate legal aid or to put it into a place where it had not previously been. I strongly urge the Minister to look again at this and to have that reciprocal part of the power so that it will be possible to put legal aid in place, or to reinstate it where it has been removed.

[Lord Carlile of Berriew]

Like other noble Lords, I wish to support what has been said by all speakers so far in this short debate. We are talking not merely about reinstatement of legal aid but about adding to legal aid issues that have not yet been considered. In the first debate this afternoon, the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, referred to his experience, which I share. When I and many others in this House started practising the law, there were many things that we had not envisaged that we now take to be absolutely basic rights. For example, equalities legislation, the equality of women and the right to equal pay in the workplace for equal work had barely started when I was called to the Bar in 1970. We must, therefore, keep the door open for such issues to be added to legal aid.

The final point is a question to my noble friend the Minister. Why are the Government opposed to addition or reinstatement? The only informed speculation, if I can call it that, which I have heard on the reasons for this provision is that Ministers feel that they would avoid being lobbied by outside interest groups if this were a one-way-only provision. Surely being lobbied is something that we expect and welcome in political life in this country, and Ministers of the Crown and their officials should be robust enough to resist if the lobbying lacks merit. If the Minister is to resist the spirit of the amendments this afternoon, the House would be grateful for a coherent set of reasons why.

[Lord Elystan-Morgan]

My Lords, I was exhilarated, enthralled and deeply flattered by the reference made by the noble Lord, Lord Thomas, to my existence 50 years ago. It is surprising that he should remember that I was there at all, let alone the hackneyed clichés that I was given to in those days.

I shall speak to this amendment, and to Amendment 23, if I may. Their effect would be to give the lie to the canard, which may well be suspected by many people, that the Government are a liquidator of legal aid. The first part of Schedule 1 is the remnant, remainder and rump of what was once a splendid system created in 1949. I make no apology for reminding the House that in 1949 the financial condition of Britain, having fought and won a dreadful war, at massive expense, was even more parlous than it is today. Yet the Government did exactly that. They sent John Maynard Keynes to the United States to negotiate, on very hard terms, a massive loan that had harsh conditions, the last instalments of which were repaid only some six or seven years ago. That was the situation and it would have been easy for the Government of the day to have said, “Justice is a magnificent thing—it is a noble ideal—but in our weakened condition we simply cannot afford it”. They did not say that, to their eternal credit. The first point to be made is that the amendments give the lie to the idea that the present Government are trying to reduce legal aid and that they are a liquidator of everything that legal aid fundamentally represents. That is neither the attitude nor the intention of the Government.

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I very much support the suggestion in the amendment of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd of Berwick. It is one answer to a potential real injustice. There are other answers, such as the retention of legal aid for children generally in clinical negligence cases, or the retention of legal aid in cases which are of sufficient gravity that they result in a substantial change in individual circumstances. I entirely accept what drives the need to restrict the scope of legal aid but this, I regret to say, is a step too far for me.

[Lord Carlile of Berriew]

My Lords, my name is one of those that have been put to Amendment 30. I set no particular store by this amendment, save to say that it is one of the attempts to deal with the issue that has been eloquently described by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd, and by my noble friend Lord Faulks, with whom I agree entirely.

Looking around the Committee this afternoon, I see a dozen or so Members of your Lordships’ House who had to deal with constituency surgeries on a regular basis while in another place. The noble Lord, Lord Wigley, who earlier spoke very eloquently, has had the same experience as me of dealing with constituency issues in quite a remote rural part of Wales. Clinical negligence relating to perinatal damage does not choose its location. It is just as likely to arise in rural Montgomeryshire or in rural Caernarvonshire. Indeed, I have certainly seen people in years gone by who have come to a constituency surgery devastated by what they believed had happened to their child while the child was being born in a neighbouring hospital. In the case of Montgomeryshire, this was almost always over the border in England, but that may be beside the point.

The people who come with these problems are often not only overwhelmed by the care of their children, but also by the future they face: the lifetime of having to look after a damaged child to whom of course they are generally entirely devoted and to whom they will give the whole of their life or the child’s life—whichever lasts longer. They are often, too, people from poor circumstances. In many cases, they have no experience of dealing with lawyers and are frightened of lawyers. They have read in the newspapers that the medical profession—and I hope I will not offend any of my many friends who are distinguished members of the medical profession—is chronically defensive in its approach to allegations. They will not be aware that the chair of the National Health Service Litigation Authority has made it clear that, in her view, legal aid for clinical negligence should continue because it is a way of ensuring that medical practice is carried out responsibly and with reasonable care.

It may be that in some big cities there are firms of solicitors who would take on cases of this kind pro bono, at least in the first stages, because they can afford to carry that excess. However, that does not apply in the small towns of rural Wales and the shire counties of England. People whose child has been damaged at birth may only know of, let alone know, one solicitor, who may be in a small practice somewhere in their neighbourhood. It is right that people in that situation be able to at least explore bringing legal action to see whether there is a course of action that may be effective in relation to the injury that has occurred to their child. In some cases, if disbursements can be expended on expert evidence, it will be shown that there is a strong case of negligence, and most of those strong cases will be settled in due course—often for very large sums of money.

The proposals in the Bill run the risk of depriving parents in that situation of the remedy which they will discover only if they and their solicitors are allowed to spend the money to obtain expert reports as early as possible. There are amendments which suggest that there should be co-operation over expert reports and that other measures should be taken to limit the costs. I applaud those proposals. I suggest to the Minister that the Government include, in any concessions that in my judgment they will be bound to make in due course on this subject of perinatal injury to children, ways of ensuring that money is not wasted on a multiplicity of expert reports, but that the right reports are obtained as early as possible. In my judgment, the case for legal aid at the early stage of potential perinatal damage claims is absolutely unanswerable. The Government would be seen to have lost their human face if they refused to amend the legislation to reflect those concerns.

I say to the Minister, however, that perinatal negligence is not the only area in which were legal aid to be removed great injustice would be caused. One can think of endless examples of poor negligent treatment in hospital which result in devastating injuries: the loss of limbs, the loss of eyes, brain damage, and so on. They fall into the same broad category as the perhaps emotive example of perinatal injury. I therefore suggest to Ministers that they should consider permitting legal aid to continue in cases—I do not say that this formulation is perfect but it reflects the spirit of what I mean—where a severe injury has occurred in a clinical setting. If those involved in such cases were permitted to receive legal aid, the injustice envisaged in the amendments would be resolved.

ATE insurance and CFAs have their place, which may be in some of the types of cases I referred to—but not right at the beginning. As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd, said clearly, the cost of insurance premiums for even quite small cases is out of proportion to the claim. Potential claimants dealing with severe injuries that occurred in a clinical setting may not be able even to contemplate the prospect of whatever element of cost they might face through the insurance system. It does not provide an answer to all cases.

I urge my noble friend to answer sympathetically the huge burden of representations that have been made by those who have knowledge and experience of conducting these cases or experiencing their consequences directly. They make an overwhelming case.

[Lord Phillips of Sudbury]

My Lords, my name is on Amendment 30A, along with that of my noble friend Lord Faulks, who spoke clearly and persuasively to it, and that of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, who apologises for his inability to be here today. He sent me a note in which he rather pithily justified the contents of the amendment—which, it has to be said, is more modest than the one so eloquently moved by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd, at the start of the debate.

The noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, made two points. He stated that,

“in many cases a report”,

from an expert,

“will be sufficient to produce a settlement … where this is not possible, its contents will enable solicitors to decide whether the case can or cannot be taken on a C.F.A.”.

These are two great virtues. Even those in this Committee who have had nothing to do with clinical negligence claims—I congratulate them because these cases are grisly affairs and perhaps the most unsatisfactory and anguish-making aspect of litigation—will know that the expert’s report is absolutely crucial to everything to do with the case. It currently determines whether you get legal aid, and, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, said, in future if the reform goes through it will determine whether you get effective coverage under a conditional fee agreement.

I will give the vivid example of a case notified to me by Emma Braithwaite, a solicitor with the National Health Service Wales Shared Services Partnership. Noble Lords may not know that Wales is way ahead of us in trying to find a via media between conflicting issues in clinical negligence cases. Amendment 99A attempts to address the general picture. This particular case was finalised by the payment of damages by the NHS of £4,500. The costs, which NHS Wales had to pay, were £95,897. Roughly half the amount—£44,000—went on legal fees. The case was conducted under the conditional fee system. The balance was mainly experts’ fees.

The case was always small; it was never a case in which large damages would ever be contemplated. The initial offer from the NHS was £3,000, which as I said, settled on £4,500. In a nutshell that explains why we will spend more time on clinical negligence than many who are not lawyers can readily understand. However, it makes it absolutely clear that we need to introduce effective, practical reforms that will make this whole area of litigation fairer, cheaper and speedier. That is why Amendment 30A is in this group.

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[Lord Wallace of Tankerness]

My Lords, it would not be appropriate to second guess, as it were, what the director of legal aid casework might decide on any individual case. Suffice to say that the purpose of having Clause 9 in the Bill is to take account of cases where the client would find considerable difficulty in presenting their own case and where there is, indeed, a complexity—these are not necessarily cumulative—in the important issues at stake. The fact that we estimate that some £6 million would be spent in dealing with these complex and lengthy cases is indicative of the fact that we do take—

[Lord Carlile of Berriew]

I apologise for interrupting my noble and learned friend again but does he regard it as satisfactory that cases falling within what my noble friend Lord Faulks described as a cohort should be determined not on a merits-based approach but on an administrative law approach? If an aggrieved party wished to challenge a decision of the director of civil legal aid, and what the Minister is saying applies, it will have to be necessary for the aggrieved person to show that the director of civil legal aid was Wednesbury unreasonable, which has only the remotest connection with the merits of the case. Is this really the system that the Government wish to inflict on people whose babies have suffered devastating perinatal injuries?

[Lord Wallace of Tankerness]

We do not wish to inflict the scenario which my noble friend indicates. The scale at which we believe the exceptional funding will be used is indicative of our expectation that exceptional funding will be available to assist these very profound cases. No one is disputing the seriousness of this. However, the amount of money that is being made available is not insignificant by any stretch of the imagination—£6 million out of the £16 million that is sought to be saved overall—which indicates that this measure is not just incidental but tries to address very directly the proper and sensitive concerns that have been raised.