Clause 37
Legal Services Bill [Lords]
5:45 pm
John Mann (PPS (Rt Hon Richard Caborn, Minister of State), Department for Culture, Media & Sport; Bassetlaw, Labour)
You missed, I suspect, Sir Nicholas, the floods and downpours across the north of England over the weekend. Hon. Members are more than making up for it with their attempts to water down the Bill. Indeed, one wonders whether one is living in a parallel universe. I expect the Tardis to appear at any moment. I know which Time Lord will be backing the people and which will be backing the solicitors, barristers and judges.
It is absolutely extraordinary in the context of the Bill and what is happening in the real world that we are seeing attempt after attempt after attempt by the vested interests of the legal profession to look after their own. If this was trade union legislation 15 years ago, if this was the immediate fining of trade unions for technical flaws in the holding of industrial action ballots,would the hon. Member for North-West Norfolk(Mr Bellingham) argue that it was capricious and over the top? I think not.
Let me balance the argument and cite the case of four of my constituents who three years ago madea consumer complaint against Rayleys Solicitors. Rayleys Solicitors disputed it. They disputed the fact that these four, elderly, ill miners had a complaint. All four went with me to visit Rayleys unexpectedly, with a little bit of publicity, and we went inside and met the senior partners. We explained their case for justice in no uncertain terms. Still Rayleys refused to pay out. They still do today. There have been no fines on Rayleys. They are allowed to prevaricate. Why? Because every time one thing happens, the legal profession comes up with a legal excuse for challenging it.
My constituents were required to go through70 pages of technical legal arguments as the defence to a very straightforward complaint that they had been diddled and double charged over meagre compensation for emphysema, money they needed to give them a better quality of life. They had 70 pages of legal argument thrown at them as the defence that they are required to make a judgment on. It is only because of the common sense of the Law Society in allowing representation from people like me that these claims have ever seen the light of day.
Is it a coincidence that no miner or textile worker put in complaints before tiny numbers of MPs started to do so on their behalf? Is it just a coincidence that none of them did so, that they did not realise that they could challenge the solicitor who had, in some cases, stolen the money from them? That was done quite openly and quite deliberately and from large numbers of them. The solicitors then threw the legal book at them, wriggling every way, challenging the Law Society, challenging the regulation. They issued writs, bullied, threatened and intimidated.
There are solicitors who visited complainants at home. There are solicitors who sent third parties to visit complainants at home. For example, my constituent, after his third heart attack, is no longer in the statistics of the Law Society because he withdrew his complaint, fearing that the pressures being put on him by the solicitors who had done him over would kill him. Some of my constituents who, in the process of attempting to get justice, died—