Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

I agree entirely with my right hon. Friend the Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw). To put it slightly differently, the hon. Gentleman is quite right that firms might want to hang on to work even after it goes beyond their expertise, so an inducement to pass it on might work. I am not saying that in favour of referral fees, but it does happen, and we have to be aware of it. He is absolutely right about the definition of referral fees. When the Minister announced, rather hastily, in response to my right hon. Friend, that the Government were banning them, he admitted that he could not define ““referral fee””. The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right, therefore, that a number of problems still need to be resolved, but those are questions that he should be putting to his Front Bench team. He should be asking why they have not sorted out these matters, including on his point about text messages.