Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

That is why I will be very pleased to support amendment 163, which is in my hon. Friend's name. As I have indicated, there are some cases—libel is a good example—when damages are small, but the defamation is important. Under the Secretary of State's scheme, more than the sum of the damages could therefore be taken in fees. Let me go through other areas of law, and I will come to privacy at the end if I have time. On clinical negligence, it is unavoidable that there will be good and bad doctors, just as there are good and bad in any profession. It is just and proper that compensation is paid to anyone harmed as a result of inaction, negligence or incompetence when a medical professional fails to live up to their obligations. I say that despite the fact that when the Secretary of State gave the figures, he conflated the cost of damages, claimant costs and defendant costs and pretended that they were a cost figure in themselves, for which he had to make another apology to my right hon. Friend the Member for Tooting (Sadiq Khan). On professional negligence, taking on a professional is always risky. No one knows the system better. People are never 100% likely to win such cases. Without success fees to compensate for the risk, many such cases will not be brought in future. So who will lose out? It will be the first-time home buyer whose surveyor negligently fails to spot subsidence, the pensioner whose financial adviser negligently makes a high-risk investment, the hard-working small businessman whose accountant negligently fails to prepare accounts and lands him with a huge tax bill that he cannot pay, and the bereaved family whose probate solicitor takes three years to deal with the case and then charges huge fees. Those are the kinds of case that our constituents experience. Business and human rights cases perhaps highlight the problems even more starkly. My hon. Friend the Member for Wigan (Lisa Nandy) has tabled an amendment, which I fear she will not have time to speak to, that addresses precisely this issue. It is backed by Amnesty International, the Catholic Fund for Overseas Development, Friends of the Earth and Martyn Day of Leigh Day and Co., who brought Trafigura to justice on behalf of 30,000 Côte d'Ivoirians who were poisoned by toxic waste. I move on to employers' liability and breach of duty by an employer. We have created some of the safest workplaces in the world in Britain, and our incidence of accidents at work is among the lowest in the world. That is thanks in large part to the labour and trade union movement, which has made it a priority over the past 100 years. In one fell swoop, victims will have their rights taken away and employers will be incentivised to act negligently and capriciously. Insolvency practitioners—for whom even Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs and the Insolvency Service are lobbying for an exemption—have told us that they will not be able to bring cases. Given that HMRC is the largest creditor, with 25% of all unsecured credit, the public purse will lose out by up to £200 million a year. It will actually cost us money to enact the Bill. I will move on to industrial diseases. The Association of British Insurers, an organisation that the Minister knows well and has met many times, is still obstructing victims of pleural plaques to try to avoid paying out. In the Insurance Times, it described a recent ruling in favour of victims of pleural plaques as a ““disappointment””. Finally, in the minute or two I have left, I turn to privacy cases and the amendment in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for Rhondda. No one can forget the case of Milly Dowler. It remains a great source of anger throughout the country. When we heard that the phones of Milly's parents, Bob and Sally, had been hacked by News International, we were all rightly outraged. We often hear about rich and powerful people having their privacy or reputation trashed by the press. However, there are thousands of cases that happen quietly to weak, vulnerable people who are exploited for cheap and tawdry scandal. Their only recourse is through the courts, and the only means to achieve justice is no win, no fee. The Dowlers bravely put their case to the Prime Minister. Without no win, no fee, they could never have taken on the leviathan of News International. I will quote briefly from the Dowlers' letter to the Prime Minister:"““What helped was the fact that we would be insured if we lost a case and the premium…would be taken from the other side if we won. Without that we would not have been able to start a case or even threaten it.""We were lucky that we fell under that system. We understand that the new law will affect thousands of people who want to sue News International and other newspapers. We had understood that you were on the side of the people not the press. Please do not change the law so that the ability to sue the papers is lost.””" They end by saying:"““We are sure you do not want to go down in history as the Prime Minister who took rights away from ordinary people””." I put those comments to the Minister and the Secretary of State today. That is the question being asked of us. Do we want to go down as the Parliament that took rights away from ordinary people so that large companies could break the law and behave as they like, without people being able to challenge them? Part 2 of the Bill is appalling. Access to justice is being destroyed. When the Minister challenged me earlier and said that I was talking about part 2 during our discussion of part 1, as so often he missed the point.