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Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Higgins, quoted the reason, which states that the amendment, "““would alter the financial arrangements made by the Commons””," and goes on to state that, "““the Commons do not offer any further Reason””." As an old parliamentarian, he knows that if an amendment infringes privilege, that is the only reason that will be given. Obviously, when taken against the national economic crisis that we are dealing with, these various precise sums will always be able to be argued away as almost too trivial to worry about. Perhaps I may relate to the House some other thoughts that have also motivated our approach in trying to reform legal aid in this area. Clinical negligence claimant lawyers' bills, which the National Health Service Litigation Authority has to pay, have more than doubled from £83 million in 2006-07 to £195 million in 2010-11. As part of this, CFA success fees to claimant lawyers have more than doubled in the past four years from £28 million to £66 million, and the NHSLA pays out an estimated £33 million in claimant insurance premiums. However, damages paid to claimants have risen more slowly—from £579.4 million to £863.4 million over the same period—and the NHSLA has controlled its own defence legal costs much more carefully, rising only 26 per cent during the same period. One motivation behind our approach in this whole area has been the impact that the system brought in by the previous Government in 2000 has had on the National Health Service, with an extraordinary rise in payments to lawyers. We are trying to address that. In doing so, early on we listened carefully to concerns about the specific issues faced by the most vulnerable children at the most vulnerable point in their lives, and we brought forward amendments to deal with that. Of course, in these areas there will always be disputes about where you draw the line and what happens to those on the other side of that line. However, in bringing forward our amendments our intention was to meet that initial lobbying, and we responded to it most positively. However, that was immediately followed by further lobbying that this should cover all children, but we do not believe that that is necessary. The amendment purposely captures clinical negligence before, during and shortly after birth. We believe that that is a proportionate means of meeting the policy objective of targeting legal aid on the most serious and complex cases that would otherwise struggle to obtain a CFA. The eight-week period is an appropriate period of time at which to draw the line, because most of the serious and complex clinical negligence cases involving neurological injuries to infants are likely to arise from treatment or care administered during this period, when the infant can be considered to be most vulnerable. We have drawn the post-birth line at this point because of that. We also recognise that some children will be born prematurely and will need fairly intensive medical supervision in the first weeks of life. Any cases in which negligence occurs beyond this point will need to be considered under exceptional funding on a case-by-case basis. It is difficult—