Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

I will not, if the right hon. Gentleman does not mind. I shall not go into the issue of legal aid, but I want to speak briefly about conditional fee agreements. The Lord Chancellor was absolutely right to say that it was a Conservative Government who introduced them, and they were right to do so. In privacy and defamation cases, the awards are for the most part very small. In privacy cases, they are universally small. No privacy case has ever involved an award of more than £60,000, yet such cases cost many hundreds of thousands of pounds to take to court. Similarly, the vast majority of awards in defamation cases come in at less than £50,000. A few get up to £100,000, and of course prominence is given in the press to the much bigger ones. I am sure that it is not the Lord Chancellor's intention, but the danger in the Government's proposals is that lawyers will simply not be able to take on such cases. Yes, they might take on cases such as the Dowlers or Christopher Jefferies, because they are open and shut cases, but in the vast majority of the cases relating to phone hacking, people are already terrified of taking an action because they do not want to have to go through the whole business of having their privacy re-explored by the national newspapers and in court. Those people will have no opportunity in the future. I should tell the House that I myself have used a conditional fee agreement, and that if it were not for lawyers being prepared to act on that basis, there is no way that the whole phone hacking scandal would have been exposed. Question put, That the Bill be now read a Third time. The House divided: Ayes 306, Noes 228.