Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

My Lords, I very much welcome this amendment and thank the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, for having taken the opportunity to move and to promote it. He has already explained my particular interest as the now chairman of the charity that receives money made under these orders, which I prefer to call pro bono cost orders rather than Section 194 orders, because that is what they are. They are cost orders in the same way as the court grants costs in any other case. It is just that they do not go to the lawyers; they go to this charity which then distributes them. I should also declare an interest as the non-executive president of the Bar Pro Bono Unit and patron of the National Pro Bono Centre, two organisations that might—one of them certainly has—receive some of the grant money. As the noble Lord has explained, the reason for these orders is the so-called ““indemnity principle”” in our costs regime. The indemnity principle means, first, that the court can order one party to pay the other party’s costs but only if that party is liable for those costs. In pro bono cases, the body is not liable for costs. That has several consequences, one of which is that you do not have the normal result at the end of the case where often the successful party receives costs. That results in the oddity—this is where I first saw the anomaly—of the unsuccessful party, the undeserving party if your Lordships will, receiving the benefit of the pro bono services, perhaps of some advocate as distinguished and able as the noble Lord, Lord Pannick. That cannot be right. Secondly, there is no incentive to settle cases, which there often is in English cases, when there is a possible liability to costs at the end of the day. We have seen in a number of cases how that affects whether cases are settled; insurance companies and corporations will pay to a deserving claimant because they know that at the end of the day they will have to bear some costs if they do not. Thirdly, it has proved to be a very valuable source of additional money for voluntary organisations providing pro bono services. I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, for paying tribute to the lawyers—solicitors, barristers and legal executives—who do this for free and without payment. When I established the Bar Pro Bono Unit, I asked whether members of the Bar would be prepared to commit to three days of free unpaid work a year, and straightaway I had an overwhelming response. People are prepared to do this, and that is a great credit to them. I have one thing to say to the Minister, which I always say when talking about this subject: this is not a substitute for a properly funded legal aid service but an adjunct to it, and a very valuable one. However generous a system might be, and we hope very much that the noble Lord will produce a more generous system at the end of the Bill, there will still be a need for this unit. However, as the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, has explained, there is a gap in that the House of Lords is not covered—