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Legal Services Bill [Lords]

May I start by saying that I am not a solicitor or legally qualified, but I have a vested interest to declare: for the six years that I have been a Member of the House, along with my hon. Friend the Member for Bassetlaw (John Mann), I have been defending and trying to get justice for hundreds of poor and weak constituents who have been treated appallingly by the legal profession and who need the measures that are in this Bill to protect them from some of the sharp practices to which he referred. I will come on to the Law Society in a minute. I congratulate it on cleaning up its act in terms of the legal complaints service. It has improved and is doing a good job in trying to get justice for many of my constituents, but there is still a sense of denial there. I will refer later to the letter from Fiona Woolf and to the view that a minority of solicitors are involved. It is interesting that the majority of hon. Members who have spoken have direct vested interests, being either solicitors or barristers, or connected in some way with the legal profession. The point has been made that a minority of solicitors are involved. I am sorry, but I do not agree. My hon. Friend the Member for Bassetlaw has mentioned the companies in his area that have been involved, and I do not think that there is a single solicitors’ firm in the north-east which has not taken part in the feeding frenzy in respect of miners’ compensation. I was first alerted to this issue almost 5 years ago, when an 86-year-old woman came to see me. She walked into my surgery on crutches. She was a miner’s widow; unfortunately, her husband had died some 5 years earlier. She had been to a firm of solicitors in Newcastle called Mark Gilbert Morse, which had touted for business by putting advertisements in newspapers and targeting vulnerable people such as my constituent. She had been awarded a claim for the injustice that her husband had suffered, and Mark Gilbert Morse had taken 25 per cent. of that compensation—some £8,000—even though every single penny of its costs was being paid for by the Government.