Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

My Lords, it is very evident from the three interventions that this matter is clearly exercising the Committee. I certainly note from the experience of the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, having chaired a rules committee that perhaps we are going into territory which we may not have been in before. As to what my noble friend has said, I sometimes hesitate to put things on the face of the Bill because, as we all know, once there, they limit what a rules committee might be able to do if faced with an obvious set of circumstances where it does not believe there should be one-way costs shifting, and it can inhibit that. However, I take the point that unreasonableness could be going too far towards the other extreme in terms of its lack of clarity. My noble friend asked: if it is not possible to put something in the Bill, what assurances could be given? That is something we shall certainly want to reflect on when considering these contributions. I am sure that we shall have an opportunity to address this again at the next stage of the Bill, and if there are assurances that can be given, I would hope that we would be able to do so. Perhaps I may leave it at that for the moment. We recognise the importance of the points that have been made. I should restate that there already appears to be broad agreement that there should not be a primary financial threshold in personal injury cases for QOCS, although that would not necessarily apply were QOCS to be extended at some later date to other categories of personal injury. I hope that reassures my noble friend on that particular point. Amendments 143 and 144 seek to replace the Lord Chancellor’s discretionary power under Clause 45(2) with a duty to make regulations in respect of the recovery of ““after the event”” insurance premiums relating to expert reports in clinical negligence cases. I can give the Committee the assurance that we intend to allow for this recoverability so that poor people can get expert reports in clinical negligence cases without having to pay for them upfront. However, we have deliberately kept a degree of flexibility around the drafting of the regulations. The effect of Amendments 144A to 144D is to extend the recoverability of ATE insurance premiums to all civil cases. Unlike the current exception for clinical negligence, the proposed exception is intended to apply to ATE insurance which covers the risk of paying opponents’ costs as well as funding expert reports.