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Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

My Lords, there is something ironic in the desire of the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, to maintain legal aid for children as a child might be very much better off pursuing a claim by means of a conditional fee agreement as things stand at the moment. I shall explain. My noble friend Lord McNally has on two separate occasions during the Bill's passage outlined fully the Government's intention to introduce a supplementary legal aid scheme, which was part of the Access to Justice Act 1999, passed by the party opposite, whereby there would be an automatic 25 per cent deduction from the damages recovered by a claimant who is legally aided. As things stand, if a child succeeds under legal aid in obtaining damages, 25 per cent of those damages will be taken by the state under the proposed supplementary legal aid scheme, which will be used to fund other applicants for legal aid automatically. Under a conditional fee agreement, the solicitor who acts on behalf of the child claimant will be entitled to recover his fees, if he can establish the case, from the other side. But when it comes to the success fee, under these proposals, it will be recoverable from the damages of the child and limited to 25 per cent of those damages. A success fee cannot exceed 100 per cent of the lawyer's normal fees that he recovers from the other side, so it may never come anywhere near the 25 per cent of the damages that the child recovers. Under a conditional fee agreement, the success fee is related to the amount of the fees, not the amount of the damages. There is not a 25 per cent deduction from the child's damages automatically. That is just a cap to prevent a success fee from going to an extreme amount. Consequently, it may be that the legally aided child, who will have an automatic 25 per cent reduction of his damages, will be in a worse position than one under a conditional fee agreement. I do not think that that point has properly sunk in. It is for that reason that I look to the Government, perhaps not tonight but at some time if regulations come forward for the supplementary legal aid scheme, to exempt children from the 25 per cent reduction proposed under that scheme. As things stand, 25 per cent will be taken off. For those reasons, I do not think that the amendment proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, assists the children that he wishes to help.