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Small Claims (Courts)

: That is not my experience, and I can speak only from my experience and the general experience. I shall deal with both of the hon. Gentleman's points. I know where to look for the list of those lawyers who hold themselves out to do personal injury work, and I have made the case that there are some good and competent ones, but when as a London MP I send people to seek assistance from local personal injury lawyers, or they visit themselves, they are often told that the firm is too busy to take on their case. The pressures on those good practitioners is extreme. There are also practitioners doing that work who are no good, and in my career I have never been able to say that the substantial number of solicitors or solicitors' firms approved by the Law Society do not include a significant number who are not up to the job and who do it poorly. One of the great failures of the past 25 years has been that there have been a lot of poor lawyers, or people who purport to be lawyers but turn out not to be when one investigates further, because they are simply individuals who work for a law firm in which there may be only one lawyer. The representation across the board is not very good, and in some areas it is worse than others. The complaints system has been significantly inadequate over the years in dealing with complaints about when people go to the lawyers in the first place.