I refer the hon. Gentleman to my new clause; I think he will then get the point.
Sylvia Henry was a social worker who was wrongly accused of being negligent in the Baby P case. As a consequence, she was horrendously defamed and banned
from carrying out child protection work. The CFA helped her to challenge the press’s accusations. A newspaper we have heard mentioned many times today, The Sun, apologised after reporting that Mr Abdul Patel was an evil terrorist who had been jailed for his part in a transatlantic terror plot. Mr Patel has never, as the paper acknowledged, had any involvement with terrorism acts. He was helped by a CFA. Finally, Elaine Chase was a paediatric community nurse who was falsely accused by The Sun, on the front page and inside that paper, of hastening the deaths of 18 terminally ill children by over-administering morphine. She fought and won her case with the support of a CFA.
We will now have a double whammy under this Bill and the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012, whereby a claimant will, quite rightly, have to pass a higher test to bring the claim but will also need the financial resources to go to law. Is that fair? How many people who have been defamed will have the case to go to court but not the means, and will therefore have no way of clearing their name?
Let us consider the other side of the argument, which is the position of the defendant. As the relevant part of the LASPO Act is not yet in force, a defendant also has the ability to use no win, no fee conditional fee agreements and after-the-event insurance. If the defendant is successful, the lawyer gets paid and receives a success fee from the claimant. Of course, the defendant does not receive damages. Alternatively, if the defendant loses the lawyer does not get paid but the ATE policy pays the claimant’s costs.
Let me give a couple of examples to illustrate my point. Members of the Public Bill Committee will be familiar with the case of Peter Wilmshurst, but it is important that it is understood by the wider House. Peter Wilmshurst was a scientist who was sued by the American pharmaceutical firm NMT Medical after he criticised its research at a US cardiology conference in 2007 and his comments were quoted by a journalist. Henrik Thomsen, a Danish radiologist, was sued by GE Healthcare for comments he made about a drug, again at a conference. If they had been unable to rely on CFAs and ATEs, they probably would not have been able to defend themselves at all.
As a result of the LASPO Act, defendants will now be faced with three options. First, they can issue a grovelling apology, even if they were absolutely right to say what they did, and hope that that is sufficient to avoid being sued. Secondly, they can try to defend themselves in court without legal assistance or any legal advice and face losing; they will also probably face highly paid, highly skilled lawyers on the side of a major corporation. Thirdly, they can try to scrape together the money to pay a lawyer while bearing in mind that if they lose, the cost might wipe out all their resources. Do we really want eminent doctors and scientists running the risk of losing everything, or preferring not to take the risk and retracting what they said, even though it might be correct and that scientific and medical research might save lives? Of course, the Minister will say that the barrier to pursuing a case will be higher once this Bill is enacted and that that will stop vexatious and intimidatory claims, but that will not happen without an early strike-out route.
My new clause also covers privacy cases, and there can be better illustration of the harm that the LASPO Act will cause than the terrible case involving Milly Dowler. Sally Dowler has gone on record, saying:
“At the outset we made clear that if we had to pay the lawyers, we could not afford to bring a claim; or if we had any risk of having to pay the other side’s costs, we couldn’t take the chance. If the proposed changes had been in place at that time we would not have made a claim. Simple as that, the News of the World would have won, because we could not afford to take them on.”
That is why it is so important to exempt defamation and other matters covered by my new clause from the LASPO Act.
We are not alone. Even Lord Justice Jackson talked about moderated success fees, but the Government have not included his proposals to mitigate the impact of the LASPO Act. The Bill rebalances defamation law in favour of defendants. If we do not remove cases from the LASPO Act, we will condemn wrongly accused people to not receiving justice. How can that be right?
We did not have sufficient time to explore the issue fully in Committee, so let me take the opportunity to put on record what was said in a letter to the Prime Minister on 26 March, in advance of the final stages of the LASPO Bill. The letter was signed by Christopher Jefferies, Gerry and Kate McCann, Peter Wilmshurst, Robert Murat, Hardeep Singh, Nigel Short and Zoe Margolis.
3 pm
You will be relieved to hear, Mr Deputy Speaker, that I shall not read the entire letter, but it is important that the House hears the important points that it makes. It says:
“We strongly object to the passing of this unjust measure and urge you”—
the “you” is the Prime Minister—
“to amend it before it is too late…Of course we are the first to recognise that legal costs in many cases are too high and also that some reforms are justified, but the bill includes changes to Conditional Fee…Agreements and to After-The-Event…Insurance schemes which will effectively make them non-viable in libel and privacy cases, where financial damages to a successful claimant are far too small to cover these costs as the bill currently proposes they should. So only the rich could take on a big newspaper group. A successful libel defendant obviously does not get any damages so these reforms will prevent all but the rich from being able to defend their right to free speech against wealthy or corporate libel claimants. Although the aim of reducing costs is very laudable, the position of lower and middle income claimants and defendants in these types of cases has simply been ignored.
Even if a lawyer will take a high-profile case without a ‘success fee’ that compensates for the risk of losing some cases, or even does the case pro-bono, there is still the enormous risk to defendants and claimants that if they lose, they will have to pay the other side’s costs. A person of ordinary means in that position basically has the choice of living with injustice or risk losing their home…In practice this means that in future ordinary defendants…will also be unable to get support for legal action taken against them often by large institutions with deep pockets trying to silence them. That would be bad news for science and medicine, for free religious debate and for transparency in the public interest…We urge you to take action now to amend the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders bill.”
Obviously, such action was not taken. Subsequently, the Prime Minister promised the Dowler family that, prior to the abolition of no win, no fee, there would be a regime in place that would protect claimants, but no such regime has been established to date.
If we cannot get things right in this House, I trust that, when the Bill reaches the other place, Lord McNally will honour a promise he made to Lord Prescott. Let me remind those hon. Members who might be blissfully unaware of what was said. When Lord Prescott, the former Deputy Prime Minister, was moving an amendment to the LASPO Bill, he said:
“I have benefited from the current no-win no-fee arrangement in pursuing my case against the Murdoch press and the Metropolitan Police. I would not have been able to pursue that case without such an arrangement because, quite simply, I would not have been able to afford it. This Bill strengthens the media’s case by reducing their costs, even if they are found guilty and damages are awarded against them. However, not only does it reduce their costs but it transfers the costs to the successful complainant. However one looks at it, it is not justice for the person who wins the case to be penalised by further costs.”
Lord McNally’s ministerial response was very clear:
“I give noble Lords as full an assurance as I can. Bills have to go through Cabinets and Cabinet committees, et cetera, but they also have to go through two Houses of Parliament, where this issue is extremely live. I cannot imagine that the kind of issues that the noble Lord, Lord Prescott, has raised tonight will not be dealt with fully in that Defamation Bill.”
In anticipation of Lord McNally’s response, Lord Prescott had said:
“The Minister is talking about whether this can be put into the Defamation Bill. If it is right to put it in that Bill, why wait? I fear that when the Defamation Bill is debated it will be all about defamation costs but there will be very little about privacy breaches, which is what the amendment is concerned with…To duck behind the Defamation Bill and say that it will be dealt with then is frankly not giving the issue the justice that it is entitled to. I am saying that we should side with the weak in this case, not the powerful. Let us have justice. That is what this place is about.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 27 March 2012; Vol. 736, c. 1324-1332.]
Let me repeat Lord McNally’s crucial words:
“I cannot imagine that the kind of issues that the noble Lord, Lord Prescott, has raised tonight will not be dealt with fully in that Defamation Bill.”
I, like many others, have pored over every line of the Defamation Bill, so perhaps the Minister will be able to shine a light and point out where the Bill fully deals with such issues. New clause 2 would flush out those hidden words, and if the Minister cannot find them in the Bill, let us agree to the new clause so that they are put in. I hope that he will either highlight where those words have hidden themselves, or find a way of ensuring that we get what was promised.