Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

My Lords, I join all those who have spoken in favour of the amendments, in particular Amendment 166ZB, to which I have appended my name with those of my noble friend Lord Martin and the noble Lord, Lord Collins. If one were to ask whether Britain is an overlitigious society, the answer would be yes and no. There are massive abuses that we are all aware of; there have always been abuses in the law. A small percentage—a minority, I like to think—of the profession to which I belong, and I have belonged to both sides of it, belongs to that class that Dr Johnson spoke about when he said: "““The fell attorney prowls for prey””." There have always been brethren who have been involved in that way, but they are, as I said, a very small minority. The Government are absolutely right to aim their weapon at such malpractices, but the weapon that they are aiming, it seems to me, is a blunderbuss with a very wide barrel, throwing a huge cloud of shot many yards wide that will hit many targets, some of them worthy and some of them not. My appeal to the Minister who will reply to this debate is not to express a Molotovian no to these appeals, which have been so sincerely and so solidly made. It would be utterly wrong to allow many worthy referral schemes to be destroyed wantonly just because the Government may not be sufficiently imaginative to look at each and every one of these situations separately. It was very proper of the noble Lord, Lord Collins, to remind the Committee of the primary origins of so many trade unions: friendly societies and societies of brethren, uniting in brotherhood to try to bring about a justice that society as a whole was not able to give them at that time. It is a very worthy history. Therefore on that basis, speaking with the experience of one who has been a solicitor, a barrister and for some 20 years a judge, I concur completely with everything that I have heard. These are deserving cases and it would be wrong, unjust and utterly unworthy of the Government to lump them all together and treat them as if they were pariahs to be attacked in this way.