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8.47 pm
Mr. David Kidney (Stafford): Before I became a Member of Parliament at the last general election, I was a solicitor in a private practice on the high street in Stafford, dealing with a fair amount of legal aid work. Not long after I came here, I first heard the cry of an hon. Member--oft repeated since--that there are too many lawyers in this place. Perhaps it is my legal background, but I am a bit suspicious of such sweeping generalisations, so I went off to find out the facts.
The three main parties in the current Parliament contain 64 lawyers. I do not know whether hon. Members think that that is too many or too few. There are 36 barristers and 28 solicitors. Since 1983, when there were104 lawyers in Parliament, the number of both barristers and solicitors has fallen consistently at every election.
Fiona Mactaggart (Slough):
Am I not right in thinking that my hon. Friend is counting only lawyers who practise professionally, and that there are some 80 legally qualified
Mr. Kidney:
I do not want to spend too much time discussing the composition of the House, but the figures that I have given, relating to the stated occupations of Members, come from the House of Commons Library and, in the case of earlier years, from research by Butler Election Studies. There are far more teachers and lecturers in the House--and the biggest group of all is made up of those whom some people nowadays sneeringly call professional politicians.
All that is beside the point, however. Let me finish declaring my interest. As soon as I was elected, I stopped being a solicitor in my high street practice, believing that all my attention was required for this job--a belief that experience proved to be justified. The legal paperwork relating to my retirement has not been completed--why are these lawyers so slow?--and I technically still have an interest, including part-ownership of the buildings from which my practice worked. On the letterhead, I am now described as a non-practising consultant. However, I have done all I can to distance myself.
Having said that, I want to defend lawyers from the other sweeping statement that is often made in the House: the one about fat cats. Of course there are some exceptionally well-paid lawyers. Some may be excessively well paid, but great talent attracts high pay, and in some cases, the demonstration of that talent is underpinned by the hard work that people have undertaken to get where they are. Overwhelmingly, in my view, and notwithstanding what my hon. Friend the Member for Bradford, South (Mr. Sutcliffe) said about the examples of lawyers who have gone wrong, the legal profession is filled with hard-working, dedicated and extraordinarily honest people, most of whom are not extremely well paid.
Figures given to me by the Law Society for 1997 show that the salary of a fully qualified lawyer in a firm deriving more than a quarter of its earnings from legal aid work is about £20,000 a year--a third less than that of an equally experienced lawyer in a firm doing no legal aid work at all. A salaried partner with 15 years' experience could expect to receive in gross pay less than the salary of a Member of the House of Commons.
In that connection, I draw attention to a letter that I received from a practising solicitor in Stoke-on-Trent. He read the comments that I made in an article in The Lawyer, in which I stated light-heartedly that many Members of Parliament do not like lawyers and think that they are extremely wealthy. He asked me to inform my colleagues in the House that the average family solicitor in the provinces works just as hard as, if not harder than, the average Member of Parliament, and probably earns considerably less.
In the brief time available, I shall make three points. The first has been covered by many other speakers--legal aid for personal injury cases. The second, which has been touched on by one or two other hon. Members, is the use of contracting for legal service provision. The third has just been mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Wellingborough (Mr. Stinchcombe)--the ring-fencing of funds for civil legal aid.
On legal aid for personal injury cases, there has been a substantial growth in the use of conditional fee agreements since they were first made legal in 1995.
Now they are to cover all personal injury cases except medical negligence. The Bill makes the success fee and the premium recoverable, and allows the paying party to challenge the level of the success fee.
All those are positive steps, but many hon. Members have been right to voice their concerns, and I add mine, about the danger that although the use of conditional fee agreements may extend access to justice to many people who were no longer eligible for legal aid, we may be letting people fall out at the bottom, if those who were certainly eligible to receive legal aid will now not receive it.
I draw attention to the explanatory notes that accompany the Bill, especially paragraph 74, which states that
Since 1995, 60,000 policies have been issued to cover after-the-event insurance allied to conditional fee agreements. To show the willingness of the Law Society and its members to co-operate in the use of conditional fee agreements and after-the-event insurance, five out of six of those policies are written by the accident line protect scheme set up jointly by the Law Society and Abbey Legal Protection. I believe that after-the-event insurance will grow and will be reliable, but hon. Members want an assurance that, at the beginning, legal aid will be the safety net.
Secondly, on contracting for solicitors' legal services, it is right that we should insist on quality standards from those receiving public money to deliver legal services. The current Legal Aid Board standards relate to franchising, but there is no reason why they should be set in stone. The kite marking of the quality standard might change over time. More than 2,000 firms of solicitors are already franchised, and another 2,000 firms have applied to be franchised.
Contracting will give the commission control over quality and cost, but it also has other responsibilities, such as ensuring that there is a national service that is accessible to all and that people have a reasonable choice of lawyers to carry out work for them. The Government are aware that some groups have special needs, such as people in rural or sparsely populated areas and ethnic minorities. I would hate legal aid deserts to develop where there is no access to legal aid through a solicitor's firm. However, I accept that the community legal service goes wider than delivering services through firms of solicitors. Others have referred to the patchy service from law centres. Staffordshire has a population of 1 million, but it has no law centre. Happily, the citizens advice bureaux are excellent and there is good co-operation in Stafford between them and solicitors in private practice, even to the extent of solicitors giving their time freely by rota to give legal advice to those who go to the citizens advice bureaux.
I do not agree with those who have argued for ring-fencing of advocacy money. However, we should consider the possibility of the expense on criminal case support exhausting the legal services budget, leaving no money for civil cases. It is right that criminal defence should come first and that it should continue to be demand led, so we must accept the possibility of an overspend on criminal defence work that could eat into the civil work budget. It is pretty far-fetched to suggest that that could exhaust the community legal service budget.
Table 1B on page 70 of the excellent research paper produced by the House of Commons Library shows the expenditure year by year on civil and criminal legal aid. At 1997-98 prices, the total amount spent on civil legal aid in each of the six years since 1992 has exceeded the total spent on criminal legal aid in magistrates courts and Crown courts put together. Admittedly, there is a bit more expense on duty solicitor schemes, which are exclusively criminal work. Including that in the figures means that the total for civil legal aid is higher in four years out of six. It is far-fetched to suggest that the criminal budget will become so high overnight that it will eat up the civil budget. The ability to have more accurate forecasting and financial planning through contracting also reduces the risk of a surprise overspend in the criminal defence budget.
My hon. and learned Friend the Solicitor-General may confirm that the Lord Chancellor's Department will maintain a contingency budget. Even the Treasury in its new public service agreements expects all Departments with their own budget to have a contingency budget. If the House sees a looming problem of the spending on criminal legal work exceeding the expected amount by more than is desirable, it will be up to us to put pressure on the Lord Chancellor's Department and the Treasury, which holds the purse strings.
"the Lord Chancellor may direct that for personal injury cases . . . funding should . . . be possible where exceptionally high investigative or overall costs are likely to be necessary, or where issues of wider public interest are involved."
A direction can also be issued that, on the recommendation of the commission, an individual case should receive legal aid. Hon. Members are seeking an assurance from Ministers that people who, for whatever reason, cannot access a conditional fee agreement will have access to legal aid instead.
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