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Tribunals, Courts and Enforcement Bill [Lords]

I will deal with my hon. Friend’s point, then I will gladly give way to the hon. Gentleman. As I have already said, I do not think that VAT is applied in those circumstances, but I might be wrong. Let me emphasise that this information was disclosed as a consequence of a parliamentary question put to me by an hon. Gentleman from the main Opposition party. My hon. Friend is right, however. We must also take into consideration what we, in our rarefied atmosphere, call chambers expenses. Those include the cost of running the business, and they are shared among all the barristers who share secretarial assistants, clerking and so on. I have already made probably the biggest point about this, which is that the fees—particularly of barristers, but probably of solicitors, too—often relate to cases that have gone on across more than one tax year. We must therefore not get too carried away, but there is none the less a need to bear down on excessive legal aid costs, as my hon. Friend happily acknowledges, and which, on an earlier occasion, the hon. Member for North-West Norfolk has also acknowledged.