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Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

My Lords, this amendment effectively deals with the position in which public authorities are the defendants to claims. In cases where the state is in fact the defendant—in other words, the converse of the previous situation that we discussed—the amendment would allow for success fees to be paid when a CFA is in place. To give a brief indication of the kinds of cases that might be involved, they would cover claims for assault, battery, false imprisonment, malicious prosecution, trespass to goods or land, and misfeasance in a public office, or claims in a judicial review or under the Data Protection Act and the Equality Act, negligence where there is a wider public interest in the claim being brought—a sort of localised Trafigura situation, one might imagine—or damages in respect of an act or omission by a public authority that involved a breach of convention rights. Those are all potentially serious matters in which the state is, in one capacity or another, in the position of defendant. In those circumstances, it seems appropriate that the success fee position should not be that advocated for the rest of the legislation—although we have our differences about that too—but that the state should pay the success fee and not expect it to come out of whatever damages might be awarded to a successful complainant concerning acts that the state should never have committed. I beg to move.