Compensation Bill [Lords]

My hon. Friend is right. The reason for that is that many people fear that, when they sign a contract, it is legally binding. Some such people are taking on large firms of solicitors who directly deducted money for themselves—we are not talking about third parties. Let me give some examples of those who directly deducted money for themselves: Thompsons solicitors took £285 from one of my constituents, and Richmonds solicitors took £500 from another. There is a whole range of others: Irwin Mitchell deducted £289. Those are major firms of solicitors. Many smaller firms of solicitors also stumbled into this, such as Frank Allen Pennington, Donne Mileham and Haddock, and Colemans. They were also deducting moneys, some for themselves, some for a third party such as other claims handlers, including PR and Associates, Union and General Services—which quickly went into liquidation, so it could not be pursued through the civil courts—and IDC. There is a plethora of such claims handlers. People have to go through a process to get their money back. I will give an example of how that works, because I have today responded on behalf of a constituent to the Law Society. The complaint was put in two years ago. No assessment is made of the literacy, illness or other vulnerabilities of such people. Some of the people I am representing are in their 90s. Some have good literacy, others have very limited literacy, and they get sent large wodges of documents. Some get visits at home from solicitors when they make a complaint; some had visits from the managing partner of solicitors. Some have been taken to hotels for meals to discuss their complaint with a managing partner. Some are rung up and told, ““You are liable, because you have signed,”” and others get letters saying that. Those are the kind of people who are complaining. The vast majority of those people have had no previous contact with solicitors. Many of them tell me that they regarded solicitors as people who they would need only if they were on the wrong side of the law, and they are therefore delighted to have had no contact with solicitors. They say to me time and again, ““We have had no contact with solicitors before.”” Many of them are dealt with by their solicitors over the telephone rather than face to face, even for industrial hearing loss claims. Many are dealt with over a great distance, and the solicitors never see them—or see them only once. How are such people to know, other than by MPs campaigning on the matter, that they have a genuine complaint that can be addressed by the Law Society in getting their money back when it should never have been deducted in the first place because, in this great scheme, the Government paid the solicitors’ fees? If they are getting £8,000 or £10,000 in compensation and a solicitor says, ““The charge to you is £1,000””, they might think that to pay £1,000 to get £10,000 sounds reasonable. It sounds reasonable to me, and I know that it sounds reasonable to my constituents, because no one told them that the Government, through the scheme, were paying all the costs. These are the sums in respect of some of the solicitors involved: for Thompsons, more than £100 million; for Rayleighs, more than £55 million. The total is more than £500 million and increasing. The sum in respect of Beresfords is £80 million, and more than £100 million in potential claims costs are still to come. Those are phenomenal sums of money, and only now are people realising that those solicitors were being so appropriately generously—so to speak—paid by the Government. That was the deal that was done, and I have no criticism, as things can go in different ways. What I criticise is the fact that my constituents have to go through me one at a time to get their money back. Even with the Law Society, things have to be done one at a time. Today, I dealt with a firm of solicitors called Wake Smith—again, one of the UDM solicitors. It is one of a small handful of firms that have failed to agree to pay people back. Only a few are still resisting, and Wake Smith is one of the worst. It puts standard responses in the post—20-page legal documents full of legalese that my constituents are meant to read and understand—and it keeps getting things wrong. In a case I addressed today, it gave a 20-page document about the UDM—defending the UDM and its right to take money, and then claiming that it had virtually no relationship with the UDM. In fact, the money in question had been deducted to IDC, but it had obviously just hit the computer button and printed that off; it had not given any care and attention to the fact that this was an individual complaint from a former client of theirs—a real person who had a consumer complaint. I shall give another example; it is a classic. In correspondence sent to one of my constituents, a paragraph has been added in bold. I read and responded to it this morning. This particular consumer complaint has been going on for two years. It is stated in bold that it should be dismissed because I had no appropriate authority from ““him””—I stress that ““him””—and that I had not provided any, but that the firm involved had a client satisfaction form from him that it claimed to enclose. It was not included in the papers, and although I have asked for a copy I suspect that I will not receive it, as this was a deceased claim from a widow; her husband died 20 years ago. That highlights the kind of people we are dealing with. They not only wrongly take the money—in this case for the UDM, and also, if Wake Smith is the firm involved, probably for Indiclaim as a marketing fee as well. A fee of perhaps about £500 would be paid to Indiclaim, and there would also be a fee that it has helped the UDM and Vendside to get. But when my constituent has the temerity to complain, Wake Smith claims that it has a client satisfaction letter from her husband who died 20 years ago and who has—strangely—failed to sign an authority from me to represent him. When that sort of thing is going on, I have to ask whether the Government should not insist on automatic repayment to those people. Taxpayers’ money is going to the solicitors, so either the Government or my constituents and others have been fiddled. The double charging is straightforward—it is on top of Government fees. Either the Government should consider legal action to claw back the money from the solicitors and use it to recompense the individuals or the law should be changed so that the solicitors—and Vendside Ltd, which are claims handlers—are automatically forced to repay. That is natural justice.