Compensation Bill [Lords]

If one were always the optimist, one would say that signing that agreement led directly to the Compensation Bill, so there is some light at the end of the tunnel—except perhaps if one is running Vendside. I would certainly expect my constituents to bring in many claims. Just as a policy decision allowed the backdating to 1999 of complaints for double charging against solicitors under the miners’ scheme and made complaints admissible to the Law Society, so it is important to clarify whether the regulator, in setting a regime for claims handling, would be expected to take cognisance of comparable bodies—in this case, the Law Society. I would be grateful if the Minister clarified that. The Vendside case is particularly important. About 15 to 20 per cent. of the people involved, because of the agreement that the Government signed, never went through a solicitor. Uniquely, the claims handler, Vendside, took the claims forward, so the only remedy has been civil law. There has been no Law Society remedy, even though it was beginning to work very satisfactorily for all other cases. I do not envisage further civil actions against anyone other than the UDM and Vendside, but 15 to 20 per cent. of people did not have access to justice or consumer rights. The Bill becoming an Act is fundamental to allow those 20,000 to 30,000 people the same access to justice and consumer rights as would have applied if their cases had been handed to a solicitor. As far as cases dealt with by Moss, Ashton Morton Slack and Beresford solicitors are concerned, no one can move in my office for all the cheques arriving from companies to pay my constituents who had paid the Vendside fee in circumstances where it was wrongly and deliberately suggested to them in writing that the UDM was paying costs of their claims. Those people are now getting justice and I want the Bill to provide an exact parallel for the minority of people whose consumer rights have been denied and who have had only the remedy of civil action. Where an organisation is more than happy to spend large amounts of money on expensive lawyers, it is important to remember the small man or woman. We may be talking about a retired miner in his 80s or a miner’s widow in her 90s who have wrongly had money deducted and who have to fight against the might of Vendside, with all the money it acquired. Vendside is quite happy to throw its money away to try to stop the individual. What Vendside actually did—following legal advice, I suspect, but who knows; perhaps it will write and tell us—is change the forms. In fact, the forms changed five times; I have seen five variations. At some stage, it became a fee in lieu of membership. That is where the question of membership is fundamental. My constituents who were not members of the UDM, who worked in another trade or had retired or who were not classified legally as members got stung in different ways, but the principle is the same. The point was to put money into that organisation for nothing. The Bill must immediately resolve that sort of consumer complaint and allow people a remedy so that they can pursue justice for themselves. Mining cases are not the only ones. We are talking theoreticals, but this is not an absolutely theoretical, because a political party—the British National party—has attempted to jump on the back of industrial injury claims. In this case, we are talking about ceramic industry claims from the Potteries. Other hon. Members may have more up-to-date information than I have, but I understand that there is an intention to form a trade union. Whether it gets certified is out of our hands, because it will be determined by a certification officer. It is probably theoretically possible for the BNP to set up a trade union that could be certified. The BNP attempted with Beresfords solicitors to take claims and act as a claims handler in order to recruit through the union rather than straightforwardly to the BNP, as it had tried before. That is a real danger and we need to ensure that we do not fall into it. That is particularly the case in respect of a letter from Beresfords about what had happened in Committee. Beresfords immediately wrote to me to spell out that it had"““formed no connection with the BNP at the time, we certainly had no intention of forming such connection in the future.””" That actually makes matters worse, because Beresfords had obviously been hoodwinked by the BNP: the BNP were advertising its name, and it did not even realise that that was happening, as it spells out in the letter. That could happen in the context of the BNP setting up a trade union and attempting to get it certified, so defining what are claims handlers and what are not is vital, as is defining membership. I also want to make some remarks about all the people who had money deducted in miners’ compensation claims, because there are many of them. Tens of thousands of people have had money deducted—certainly more than 50,000 and, although it is hard to give an accurate estimate above that, there are probably many more. Let us take the example of my own constituents. I have already had money paid back by solicitors to more than 600 of them, and that number is increasing rapidly week in, week out. The list of solicitors who have been forced to pay back money—some, certain people would say, as a voluntary good-will gesture, others following Law Society adjudications—is phenomenally long. Almost 40 firms of solicitors have now had to pay back money.