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Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

My Lords, I will not detain your Lordships long. This is a simple, precise amendment. It does not cover the ground of Amendment 170, but it does repeat, almost exactly, the amendment which your Lordships' House approved just before we rose for the Easter Recess. When I moved the amendment at that stage, I made it quite plain that I felt that it was very wrong to single out a specific group of children who had suffered as a result of clinical negligence, and to leave the others. I have heard, of course, what my noble friend has said, and I do not for a moment question his personal commitment to these issues. But we have not had any adequate response in the very brief debate in the House of Commons, and my noble friend merely repeated this evening the amendment that the Government introduced at an earlier stage, which of course we welcome, but which creates an anomaly and an unfairness. When we debated this last time, my noble friend Lady Eaton—who signed the earlier amendment along with the late Lord Newton of Braintree—made a very moving speech in which she talked about a child who had not suffered from brain damage, but who had been paralysed. She talked about the needs of a child who would grow up to be able to walk, in spite of the brain damage, and a child that would remain paralysed for the rest of his life. It was a movingly made speech, which illustrated what this amendment is all about. I have heard what my noble friend has said about other means of getting support. I would just repeat a point that I made in my last speech: the National Health Service—of which we are all proud, and which we have spent many months discussing in your Lordships' House during the course of this parliamentary Session—is an agency of the state. If anyone suffers as a result of the negligence of an agency of the state, then the state should, automatically and properly, provide a means of redress. This amendment does not go so far as that, because it concerns itself wholly and exclusively with children. I believe that, in all fairness, it is an amendment that even at this late hour should commend itself once again to your Lordships' House. I believe that it would be appropriate for us to ask the other place to think again. It did not think very much about this one, and it really should. In his brief intervention this afternoon, my noble friend Lord Higgins referred to the inadequacy of time given in another place to your Lordships' considered amendments. As we look to the future of your Lordships' House, we ought to consider, in the imbalance between the two Houses, whether it might not be appropriate to do a little more insisting, if what we have deliberated on is so summarily dismissed. Given the present conventions, and the relationship between the two Houses as they exist, I do not believe that one should go on and on playing a game of ping-pong. However, in this instance we have every right to say to another place, ““Please think about this. Think about the children who suffer as a result of clinical negligence. This is your opportunity to redress an imbalance””, because welcome as it is, and I repeat that it is welcome, what the Government have done does not go far enough. Let us send this back. Let the other place think, and because there are no large sums of public money involved in this—indeed it could be argued that we are probably in the long term saving public money—let them in their charity look to those who are most deserving of that charity. I beg to move.