Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

My Lords, I know that it is Third Reading and at this point I shall speak to process and not to substance. We already have in the Bill two exemptions from certain provisions relating to success fees and cost recovery via insurance—Clauses 44 and 45. The existing exemptions for those two clauses relate to respiratory disease and industrial disease, particularly when there has been a breach of a duty of care. Amendments 25 and 28, to which the noble Lord, Lord Prescott, has just spoken, and to which I am speaking, seek to establish parallel exemptions for proceedings that include a claim for damages or other relief that relate either to personal information or breach of privacy or defamation. This is simply not the moment to try to alter the costs regime in actions pertaining either to privacy or defamation. The tectonic plates are shifting in this area. We have around us many cases that relate to criminal breaches of existing legal protections of privacy as, after all, not all have been settled. We also have a report by the Joint Committee on Privacy and Injunctions from only a fortnight ago to which nobody has yet been able to give much attention, but it deserves some attention. We have notably Lord Justice Leveson's ongoing inquiry and we have a number of parallel inquiries going on into other aspects of the phone-hacking scandals that came to light last summer. In some quarters, it is an expectation that defamation legislation will have a place in the Queen's Speech. Is that a rumour? I do not know, but in some cases I think that it is a firm assumption. I know that nothing can be said about that, but in short, this is simply not the time to alter the costs and fees regime relating to cases in this area. If defamation legislation is coming forward in the Queen's Speech, then will be the time to think about that. If not, there will be time to think about these other things that are ongoing. I believe that there would be one other way that might seem to offer the Government a route for dealing with this difficulty of timing, which I accept is not something that could have been anticipated, but it is a severe difficulty. That would be to take advantage of Clause 152, which permits different parts of the Bill for different purposes—that is an unusual way of putting it—to be commenced at different points. It would be open to the Government to delay commencement on those issues. I accept that that is a way of avoiding making commitments now that might have to be reversed if there were a Defamation Bill. However, that is simply not satisfactory from the point of view of litigants—both claimants and defendants—in privacy and in defamation where the stakes are too high and the uncertainty is too great. At this stage, an exemption parallel to the exemption in Clauses 44 and 45 would be the appropriate way forward.