Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

This is an important group of amendments to part 2 of the Bill, which deals with a complex and vital area of access to justice. Because there are only 20 minutes left to debate this group, and I want to be fair to the Minister and give him 10 minutes to reply, I shall speak quickly in the hope of getting through the main part of my argument. I should make it clear at the outset that I wish to press to a vote amendment 21, which would undo the destruction of conditional fee agreements that the Government are pushing through in the Bill. I also ask, with the leave of my hon. Friend the Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant), the lead signatory to amendment 163, that we press that amendment to a vote. Conditional fee agreements, also known as no win, no fee agreements, were brought in by a Conservative Government to preserve access to justice for those on moderate means at a time when vast areas were being removed from the scope of legal aid and eligibility criteria were being removed. The provisions were amended, with a remarkable lack of contention from the Conservative Opposition, in the Access to Justice Act 1999, to create their modern form. The idea of contingency fee agreements was to create a viable market in legal services by introducing success fees paid by losing defendants—wrongdoers, in other words—to compensate lawyers for the cases that they lost, for which, of course, they received no fees. For lawyers, that form of payment by results meant not that they would take on spurious cases, but that they were allowed to take on cases that might be 75:25 or 50:50. That has created a system that works, for the main part, very well. It has created a viable market in legal services and permitted access to justice for millions since it was introduced. What sort of people have availed themselves of contingency fee agreements? More than half of those who have used them have had an income below £25,000 a year and only 18% have had an income of more than £40,000 a year. Government Members carp on about footballers and models using them, but the average claimant is the average constituent. How do the Government's proposals work? First, winning claimants will lose. Victims will have to pay the costs of their insurance and their lawyer's success fees from their damages—up to 25% of damages, aside from damages for future care, can be taken by the lawyer, and the insurance premium will take up even more of those damages, perhaps wiping them out altogether. To make up for part of those losses, the Government plan a 10% increase in damages for pain, suffering and loss of amenity. Simple maths should be sufficient to show that that will not make up for all losses. Losing claimants, including those bringing speculative and nuisance claims, will gain. They will benefit because it is unlikely that they will have to pay the costs of the winning defendant—that is part of the perverse, qualified one-way cost-shifting scheme that the Government intend to introduce when the Bill passes. Losing defendants—wrongdoers, in other words—and their insurers will gain. Wrongdoers will benefit, because they do not have to pay the cost of after-the-event insurance or the victim's lawyer's success fees, thus limiting their liabilities and those of their insurers. Winning defendants will lose out. A winning defendant will no longer be able to reclaim the cost of their defence, thanks to qualified one-way cost shifting. To summarise, winners lose and losers win. That is simply wrong. There was a time when the Conservative party worried about access to justice, but now it appears to be nothing more than the parliamentary wing of the insurance lobby, which according to an investigation by The Guardian has donated £4.9 million to the Tories since the Prime Minister became leader. I have spent the past few months speaking to victims who have used contingency fee agreements to get justice. I have heard them tell me how our justice system helped them, and their fears that others who suffer in future will not get the help they need. A number of areas of law will be badly—