My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Wolfson, with his niche points. I keep finding myself in debates with lawyers. I must say, they have some very interesting anecdotes that we all listen to with great interest.

It is fair to say that I am deeply suspicious of everything that this Government bring to your Lordships’ House. All the legislation seems to me to be based on some at times quite cruel intentions. I am actually a little bit more suspicious of short Bills, especially those that come so quickly to this House. At first glance, the Bill does seem fairly simple. It restores the law to what it was less than a year ago and so is quite sensible, but the more one looks at it, the more it appears to be designed to protect the profits of hedge funds, sovereign wealth funds, banks and other backers of these litigation funding agreements, without any consideration of the impact that it will have on the claimants being funded.

One illustration of this is 555 sub-postmasters who were awarded compensation of £57 million against the Post Office for the Horizon scandal. It is reported that £46 million of that money was immediately payable to litigation funders. That seems an extraordinary amount: 80% of the damages awarded. I accept that it was a probably a very difficult case, but at the same time, the sub-postmasters were left with only £20,000 each, when their damages were estimated to be well over £100,000 each. In essence, they got 20% of the £100,000 they were really owed.

It makes you ask why any claimant would agree to put up so much of their compensation. The truth is that normal people cannot afford to take a case to court without such litigation funders. I have heard that we are stuck with this system and that legal aid is not likely to come back, but it seems that we have a particular lack. The noble Lord, Mendelsohn, put it quite well. If he was the amuse-bouche before the meal, perhaps I can be the mid-meal sorbet. Legal aid at least had the benefit of enabling everyone to get justice or to try to get justice. This system means that that is not true for everybody.

There is an inequality of arms in negotiations between a potential claimant and a litigation funder. Without robust regulation and protection for claimants, a litigation funder can reap huge profits by doing nothing other than provide funding for the claimant to take their case to court. One might say that there are dangers in that: of course there are, but this is a business and there are always dangers in business. This, to me, is a failure of successive Governments—just the current Government, which fail in so many ways, but also previous Labour and Liberal Democrat Governments, eroding legal aid and the state’s role in ensuring access to justice.

This litigation-funding business is now worth tens of billions of pounds, and it is a highly lucrative industry for those engaging in it. Legal aid and access to justice have been, essentially, privatised and turned into yet another arena for exploitation by hedge funds and financiers.

This Bill is also extremely lazy, because what the Government have done is choose between two options: do nothing or reverse the PACCAR judgment. They did not put any energy into thinking about a better solution: something that would help the majority of people, not just the few who get taken up by litigation funders. So I would say, “All right, it’s not awful, as some of the legislation is, but really it’s not very good”.