Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

With respect, there are ways forward on those issues, not least the idea of a joint report to be completed by a defendant and the claimant together. It would be easy for the Health Secretary to address that by ordering the individual chief executives, particularly in relation to cerebral palsy cases, to provide an independent expert's report assessing the particular birth. If that happened, litigation would go down, as would the funding to the taxpayer, and we would have speedier and better resolution of these issues. I regret to say that those sorts of things have been said by a number of Members in both Houses in the past and no one has addressed it. However, I stress that that is a matter for the Health Secretary, rather than one that arises out of the Bill. I am conscious of the time and want to address the other points that have been made; I apologise that I did not do this on Second Reading, but clearly I could not be present in the House at the time. I accept entirely the points made by the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull East about the fear of the loss of legal aid, and I will address individual children's cases, in particular, in a moment. The fear of the loss of legal aid is not something that is new to the legal profession, or in relation to negligence or the practice of personal injury law. Those same issues arose throughout the 1990s and 2000 in relation to the Woolf reforms, and many of us who were practising barristers at the time were concerned that individual litigants would be unable to go to the personal injury courts or elsewhere and bring litigation. With no disrespect to the submissions made, the matter has not been resolved, and on this particular issue conditional fee agreements have without question filled the gap. They have been extremely successful—some, including certain Ministers, would say almost too successful—at filling the gap where legal aid previously existed. I could go so far as to say that there is a distinct possibility that legal aid is much harder to apply for and—in relation to funding, as a claimant's lawyer and as a claimant—to sustain long-term than a conditional fee agreement, because the individual solicitor who takes on a conditional fee agreement effectively backs the case, whereas taxpayers, in the form of the Legal Services Commission, which supports legal aid cases, are understandably shy about spending their money. In the cases that I took to the European Court arising out of medical matters, it was incredibly difficult for us to deal with them and to get funding through the Legal Aid Board. I suspect—I cannot prove it at this particular stage, but I suspect—that in an appropriate case the conditional fee arrangement will be much better funded and supported than legal aid. I would be a cynic to say that the NHS Litigation Authority wants legal aid to continue, but it is very much proven that CFA-funded cases against the national health service are normally much more successful than legal aid-funded ones. The situation is difficult in children's cases, and I will address that in a second, but legal aid funding is not a panacea. On the submissions of the right hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake), I agree entirely with my hon. and learned Friend, who said that the amendments seemed to be probing amendments, which will not be put to the House, on an esoteric EU matter that may not necessarily occur in any event. Finally, there is common ground on both sides of the House about the problem of the middle ground for complex cases concerning children. The issue will clearly be debated in another place, and further advice will be given for and against it, but in broad terms I ask the Minister to consider this specific point: whether children's—