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Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

It is very good to have the noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, joining the debate, but if that was the best defence that the previous Government could put up for that, it was really not satisfactory. I remind the Minister that that argument has been described as, "““fallacious, and easily remedied by the simple implementation of a cap on defence fees, careful supervision by the court and/or an assessment by the court taxing officers, who are familiar with assessing what constitutes ‘reasonable’ costs in such cases””." If that was the argument put forward by my Government at that time, I say here and now that it was a fallacious argument and not one that the present Government should fall into the trap of adopting.