Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

My Lords, a range of issues could be raised under the amendment, which I support. It is self-evident—it speaks for itself—that there should be accessibility to and a maintained quality of expert evidence. For justice to be done, it frequently turns on the quality and persuasive ability of the expert who is giving evidence. We are debating the generality of the need for expert evidence. When we come to clinical negligence, we will return to more specific questions about the need to maintain particular panels. People in this field are highly respected and in very great demand, and frequently the problem is to lay one’s hands on someone who can deal with your specific problem. When I was a very young man, for a very short time I had something to do with mining cases in south Wales—a very long time ago—where the quality of the experts on both sides of the mining industry ensured that justice was done because the judges frequently knew many of the experts. The experts were well qualified on both sides. More often than not, cases were settled in view of the nature of the expert evidence that had been tendered, and that saved individuals and the state a great deal of money. Experts must be paid a proper rate for the job. Not all people want to go to the witness box to be cross-examined; they prefer to stay in the safety and comfort of their own expertise. But there are people who are prepared to give their evidence in the witness box and face whatever challenges there are. Science moves on and some of this expert evidence becomes highly expensive. There has to be a great deal of investigation, particularly in medical cases. In the most recent case that we have all read about, of Stephen Lawrence, justice was eventually done because of the quality of the forensic evidence that was tendered. The costs, we read, were astronomical. There were years of effort to establish and ensure that no stone was left unturned. We can see example after example of fingerprints, firearms, forensic accountancy and criminal negligence. Indeed, I have not revisited the issue for some years, but cot deaths were highly controversial at one stage. I suspect by now that scientific evidence is more settled than it was in the earlier years. These are the fields where justice has to be done and be seen to be done, and it saves the state a large amount of money in the long run if quality evidence is available and is tendered on both sides. Reading this amendment, I cannot see how it can be resisted. If for some reason there is a shortage of available expert evidence because the pay is insufficient to attract eminent men into the witness box, the fact that this amendment was written into primary legislation would certainly be a wake-up call to the Ministry of Justice.