Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

Well, that is what a person such as the Minister thinks will happen, as he believes in the market ideology. He was a commercial lawyer, and never got his hands dirty as some of us have had to do over the years. Clause 45 removes the recoverability of the after-the-event—ATE—insurance premium from the losing defendant. Therefore, that premium will in many instances be taken out of the damages awarded to the injured party. The amendments passed in another place would exclude industrial disease claims from these provisions, thus allowing the claimants to keep 100% of their compensation. We must uphold those changes and exempt such individuals and therefore prevent what would be a glaring miscarriage of justice. Industrial disease cases are utterly different from road traffic claims. Cases centring on diseases such as asbestosis and mesothelioma are complex and require intensive research before liability is admitted. As a result, fraudulent industrial disease claims are almost an impossibility. Because of their complexity, such claims cannot be dealt with by inexperienced litigators, but if there is neither the uplift required to allow a solicitor to take a case on a CFA nor a recoverable ATE premium, many experienced solicitors will be unable to take on cases where the chance of recovering their costs is low without the client having to pay them from their damages. That is particularly true of low-value cases in which the additional liabilities may dwarf the amount of damages awarded, leaving the claimant worse off than when they started. The potential for injustice, I am afraid, is huge. The defendant in such cases is often a multi-million pound organisation with access to teams of lawyers. It is also worth noting that after-the-event insurance also pays for additional expenses such as medical reports, without which industrial disease claims would fall at the first hurdle. Thus, without expert reports, which are necessary to prove liability, and the support of experienced solicitors who know this area of law thoroughly, claimants will simply be unable to proceed with their cases. The situation is dire enough for those suffering from asbestosis, but as the Association of Personal Injury Lawyers has pointed out, if an individual who is diagnosed with asbestosis goes on to develop later in life a fatal disease such as the lung cancer mesothelioma, but has not brought a claim for asbestosis, they will be unable to claim compensation for that fatal disease. They will then effectively be denied compensation twice. The view which seems to underpin much of part 2 of the Bill is that all no win, no fee claims are bogus. That is clearly not true, and I hope I made it clear that it is well nigh impossible to bring a fraudulent industrial disease claim on account of the high degree of medical evidence necessary. Industrial disease cases centre on situations in which an individual has suffered over a period of years on account of negligence by their employer. These individuals should not fall further victim to this Government's reforms because of their doubts about the petty claims industry. That would deny them justice, and I hope it is the last thing on the Minister's mind; although, having listened to his earlier comments, I am not sure how committed he is to these claimants in any event.