Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

My Lords, my name is on Amendment 30A, along with that of my noble friend Lord Faulks, who spoke clearly and persuasively to it, and that of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, who apologises for his inability to be here today. He sent me a note in which he rather pithily justified the contents of the amendment—which, it has to be said, is more modest than the one so eloquently moved by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd, at the start of the debate. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, made two points. He stated that, "““in many cases a report””—" from an expert— "““will be sufficient to produce a settlement … where this is not possible, its contents will enable solicitors to decide whether the case can or cannot be taken on a C.F.A.””." These are two great virtues. Even those in this Committee who have had nothing to do with clinical negligence claims—I congratulate them because these cases are grisly affairs and perhaps the most unsatisfactory and anguish-making aspect of litigation—will know that the expert’s report is absolutely crucial to everything to do with the case. It currently determines whether you get legal aid, and, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, said, in future if the reform goes through it will determine whether you get effective coverage under a conditional fee agreement. I will give the vivid example of a case notified to me by Emma Braithwaite, a solicitor with the National Health Service Wales Shared Services Partnership. Noble Lords may not know that Wales is way ahead of us in trying to find a via media between conflicting issues in clinical negligence cases. Amendment 99A attempts to address the general picture. This particular case was finalised by the payment of damages by the NHS of £4,500. The costs, which NHS Wales had to pay, were £95,897. Roughly half the amount—£44,000—went on legal fees. The case was conducted under the conditional fee system. The balance was mainly experts’ fees. The case was always small; it was never a case in which large damages would ever be contemplated. The initial offer from the NHS was £3,000, which as I said, settled on £4,500. In a nutshell that explains why we will spend more time on clinical negligence than many who are not lawyers can readily understand. However, it makes it absolutely clear that we need to introduce effective, practical reforms that will make this whole area of litigation fairer, cheaper and speedier. That is why Amendment 30A is in this group.