Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

My Lords, I have huge sympathy with the claimants in the Trafigura case, who received £30 million in damages, and if I thought that access to justice for people in their position were being blocked by this Bill I would be entirely with the noble Baroness. Unfortunately, the costs in that case were £100 million, reduced on taxation to £40 million. I do not feel particularly proud of a legal system which produces such a disparity between the damages that were actually received by the claimants and the lawyers who acted on their behalf.