Weighing in at just under eight minutes, last week’s Queen’s speech has been generally regarded as lightweight. But it contained a raft of new measures to transform the justice system and keep both the legal profession and civil libertarians very interested.

The impetus to keep US security agencies onside, and prevent a repeat of embarrasing disclosures about the torture of UK citizens, has led to the acceleration of plans to expand secret hearings into civil courts. A Justice and Security bill will be pushed through parliament this session.

The bill proposes using “closed material procedures” to prevent sensitive intelligence being revealed in civil courts. Ministers would be able to make initial decisions about material that should be withheld, and defendents or claimants and their representatives would be barred from the closed part of the hearings. In some cases the full judgments would not be published at the end of a civil trial.

Already roundly criticised as violating the most basic principles of the common law system – the right of every party to know the case against them, and the principle that there must be equality of arms between parties in court – the bill will face a tough battle, particularly in the Lords.

Announcing the National Crime Agency last June, Theresa May said: “It will be a crime-fighting organisation. It will tackle organised crime, defend our borders, fight fraud and cybercrime, and protect children and young people. Intelligence will be at the heart of what the NCA does…All other agencies will work to the NCA’s threat assessment and prioritisation, and it will be the NCA’s intelligence picture that will drive the response on the ground.” The new Crime and Courts bill would set up the NCA and also include proposals to reform judicial appointments and allow magistrates sitting on their own to deal speedily with low level cases. TV cameras would be allowed to broadcast limited footage from courts, initially in the Court of Appeal and then extended to the Crown Court. No victims, witnesses, offenders and jurors would be filmed.

The home secretary’s proposals to allow GCHQ to conduct real-time surveillance of a person’s communications and their web usage would give the intelligence services and police powers to insist that internet and phone companies hand over our data without our knowledge. She had hoped to introduce legislative changes after the Queen’s speech next month because of the importance of moving quickly.

However the proposals have proved most controversial within the coalition. They have also been widely criticised, not least by the House of Lords Constitution Committee. So much so that it has been removed from the fast tracked Crime and Courts bill into a stand alone bill. Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister, announced that the contentious measures would only be published in draft form and would be subject to widespread consultation. This could delay the proposals for at least a year. But they have not gone away.

Finally there will be sweeping changes to the libel laws aimed at protecting freedom of speech and bringing an end to so-called ‘libel tourism’ from abroad. Launching the draft Defamation Bill in March 2011, justice secretary Ken Clarke said: “The right to speak freely and debate issues without fear of censure is a vital cornerstone of a democratic society. In recent years though, the increased threat of costly libel actions has begun to have a chilling effect on scientific and academic debate, and investigative journalism. However it is never acceptable to harm someone’s reputation without just cause, so the Bill will ensure defamation law continues to balance the needs of both sides and encourage a just outcome in libel cases.” Already scrutinised by parliament, the bill now appears as a fully developed proposal. It would abolish most costly jury trials, curb online defamation and make it more difficult for large corporations to sue newspapers.

Last week the coroner in the Gareth Williams case delivered a damning verdict, highly critical both of the Metropolitan police’s counter-terrorism branch and MI6

Dr Fiona Wilcox levelled excoriating criticism at Williams’s employers at MI6 who failed to report him missing for seven days when he did not turn up for work. It took Williams’s sister, not his workmates, to call the alarm. Wilcox detailed what can only be interpreted as incompetence or callousness by his employers in respect of one of their young high fliers. And these are the very people who are supposed to be looking out for us.

Officers in the Met’s counter-terrorism branch were also strongly criticised. The Coroner’s catalogue of their evidential failings beggars belief. She said that despite a 21-month police inquiry most of the fundamental questions in relation to how he died remained unanswered. The cause of death of Williams, who was found padlocked in a holdall in the bath at his flat in central London, was, she said, “unnatural and likely to have been criminally mediated.” Scotland Yard has treated the death as suspicious and unexplained, but has tended to focus on sex play that went wrong. The coroner ruled out bondage or auto-erotic activity as explanations and was in no doubt that a third party had locked and placed the bag in the bath. She was “satisfied that on the balance of probabilities that Gareth was killed unlawfully.”

One significant point of all this is that if Ken Clarke’s Justice and Security Green Paper becomes law this inquest would almost certainly have been treated as a secret trial. The green paper proposes using “closed material procedures” to prevent sensitive intelligence being revealed in civil courts. Ministers would be able to make initial decisions about material that should be withheld. In some cases the full judgments would not be published at the end of a civil trial. There were enough security aspects in this case, including officers giving evidence anonymously, to fall within the government’s far too broad claim for secrecy. The SIS (and the Met) would have much preferred to avoid the publicity of the embarrassing criticism that came their way at the inquest.

Parliament’s joint committee on human rights (JCHR) produced a unanimously critical reponse to the green paper proposals. The Committee considered that proposals for reform, which are intended to provide the US with a cast-iron guarantee that any intelligence they share can never be disclosed in a UK court, cannot be justified, as such an aim is incompatible with the Government’s commitment to the rule of law. Dr Hywel Francis MP, Chair of the Committee, said: “Closed material procedures are inherently unfair and the Government has failed to show that extending their use might in some instances contribute to greater fairness. All other means should be pursued to allow proceedings to take place without resort to them.”

The Equality and Human Rights Commission’s submission on the green paper specifically addressed the question of inquests. The submission said: “Rather than seek to legislate for closed inquests that are likely to be incompatible with the requirements of article 2 ECHR” (European Convention on Human Rights), “greater attention should be paid to the experience of coroners and judges in managing inquests and inquiries and the variety of different practical measures that can be taken to enable sensitive material to be used without damage to the public interest.”

The proposal to allow closed material in inquests was put forward twice by the previous government, first in the Counter Terrorism Bill in 2008 and secondly in the Coroners and Justice Bill in 2009. On both occasions the proposals were withdrawn by the government following defeats in the House of Lords. Given that Parliament has already rejected the same broad proposals twice before, the Commission said: “It is unfortunate that the green paper puts forward little evidence to show that it is necessary to address this issue a third time.”

The Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill bounced back to the House of Lords on Monday for consideration of Commons’ amendments. Members of the Lords voted eight times during the debate, and in scoreboard terms, the result for the government was played 8, won 4, lost 3, with one sort of score draw.

The first defeat came on Lord Pannick’s motion that “the Lord Chancellor shall exercise his powers … with a view to securing that individuals have access to legal services that effectively meet their needs…” which was agreed by 248 – 233. Baroness Scotland moved an amendment which covered legal services for victims of domestic violence, and carried the day by the narrow margin of 239 – 236. The third government defeat came on Lord Alton’s motion on compensation for mesothelioma sufferers, agreed by 214 – 205.

The government’s wins came on amendments covering the Lord Chancellor’s duty to a person eligible for legal aid advice (telephone gateway); civil legal services for children under 18; industrial disease claims; and civil legal services for social welfare. The score draw came on an amendment concerning the independence of the director of legal aid casework. While the specific amendment had been rejected a compromise had been reached which achieved the desired result elsewhere in the bill.

Back to the Commons on Tuesday for consideration of the three defeats. The amendments on domestic violence and the statutory duty for legal aid were defeated by large majorities, but there had clearly been urgent movement on the subject of mesothelioma victims. Justice minister Jonathan Djanogly said he had considered the points made both in debates in the Commons last week and in the Lords the previous day, and had also held ministerial meetings with campaigners on behalf of victims. He moved an amendment in lieu of the Lords amendment, which was agreed without division. The amendment specifies that the mesothelioma provisions may not be brought into force until the Lord Chancellor has carried out a full review of their potential impact and has published a report on the conclusions of the review.

In true ping pong fashion the bill was back in the Lords on Wednesday. On the matter of the statutory duty for legal aid, minister of state Lord McNally asked the House to reject the amendment. He said: “I understand that the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, is not going to press it. This is really the time to ask the House to agree with the House of Commons”, and so they did. Baroness Scotland pressed her amendment on domestic violence to a vote and, remarkably, for the third time in these proceedings, there was an equality of votes, 238 – 238, and the amendment was defeated.

The Commons motion on mesothelioma was agreed without division, and that was the final act. Now that all amendments to the bill have been agreed by both Houses the bill will receive royal assent and become an act of Parliament on the last day of the parliamentary session.

Just one last, end of term, exchange between two of the main protaganists. Lord Bach congratulated the Minister on being “a member of the luckiest Government there can ever have been in the history of Parliament. The odds against drawing three votes on crucial amendments, two on Report and one at this stage of proceedings so that the Government win the vote, as it were, must be immense.” In reply, Lord McNally said: “I think that if the noble Lord were to ask Señor Torres, he would find that a draw is also sometimes a victory. He is the Chelsea centre forward. I know that the noble Lord, Lord Bach, is a Leicester City supporter and does not mix in that kind of high-class company.”

The legal aid, sentencing and punishment of offenders bill suffered 11 defeats in the House of Lords, far more than the controversial NHS reform bill that was recently signed into law.

The bill came back to the House of Commons on Tuesday, and the government announced that it was prepared to accept three of the amendments but would seek to disagree the other eight. It has agreed to accept that the new director of legal aid casework should be independent; that legal aid should be preserved for appeals to the upper tribunal, court of appeal or supreme court in welfare benefits cases; and to amend the bill’s definition of domestic violence.

On domestic violence, justice secretary Ken Clarke said: “It was never in doubt that there would be legal aid for the protection of victims of domestic violence. Domestic violence is an issue that this Government, like any Government, including the previous one, take extremely seriously. As now, it was always intended that legal aid would remain available for victims of domestic violence who were trying, for example, to obtain protective injunctions to defend themselves in such cases. In domestic violence cases there is no means test so even the super-rich can obtain legal aid if they are seeking an injunction for reasons of domestic violence, although I hope that not too many of them will.” He went on to detail extensions to the definition of domestic violence, The government will also extend from one to two years the time period in which a victim of domestic violence can claim legal aid.

The Commons voted to disagree the other eight amendments by substantial majorities, in the range of 300 – 250. These amendments included such disparate matters as the Lord Chancellor’s functions, legal aid for appeals against official decisions about entitlement to welfare benefit, the mandatory use of telephone advice lines and the cost of expert reports in clinical negligence cases. Other amendments would have returned legal aid to victims of the asbestos-related condition mesothelioma, to victims of all industrial diseases, to all children and to all damaged through clinical negligence in the care of the NHS.

Whatever the individual merits of each subject Ken Clarke made it brutally clear that it is really all about money. He said: “The scope of legal aid goes to the heart of our attempts to reform and improve the justice system, because targeting funding where it really counts is fundamental, first to the savings the Government are having to try to make in this area as in any other. There is no doubt that the present level of legal aid provision is on any measure unaffordably expensive.”

The bill is now in the official state of ping pong, defined on the House of Commons website as when “the Bill travels back and forth between the two Houses, until both Houses agree on the text of the Bill.” Next event is next Tuesday.

Right at the very end of the debate there was a bizarre exchange, recorded in Hansard thus:

Helen Jones: On a point of order, Mr Speaker. During the last debate, many of us were dismayed by the conduct of the Minister, who giggled and grinned through descriptions of people dying of mesothelioma and what they suffered. I have to say that in almost 15 years in this House, I have never seen conduct that so demeans a Minister of the Crown and is so damaging to the reputation of the House. Is there anything that you can do to ensure that in future Ministers pay proper attention to such serious debates and conduct themselves as would be expected from a Member on the Treasury Bench?

Mr Speaker: I am grateful to the hon. Lady for her point of order. The Minister is welcome to respond if he wishes, but he is not under any obligation to do so.

Mr Djanogly indicated dissent.

Mr Speaker: No, he is not going to respond.

Britain leads the world in the use of CCTV. As a result, surveillance has become an inescapable part of life. Britain has a larger DNA base and more police powers and email snooping than any comparable liberal democracy.

This is the very solid base for home secretary Teresa May’s new bill which will allow GCHQ to conduct real-time surveillance of a person’s communications and their web usage. The intelligence services and police will have powers to insist that internet and phone companies hand over our data without our knowledge. The home secretary hopes to introduce legislative changes after the Queen’s speech next month because of the importance of moving quickly. “Obviously the longer you leave it, the quicker technology can move on. I would hope that we will be able to do this in a bill in the next session” she said.

Downing Street initially brushed aside libertarian objections to maintain that laws will be passed in the coming parliamentary sessions to extend state surveillance on the internet. Draft clauses would be published as part of a bill for discussion, but No 10 insisted that this did not imply the government was backtracking. Now plans have been put on hold after being condemned by MPs of all parties. Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister, announced that the contentious measures would only be published in draft form and would be subject to widespread consultation, concessions that could delay the proposals for at least a year.

The coalition partners appear to be on a collision course after the Liberal Democrat president, Tim Farron, said his party was prepared to kill any moves towards universal surveillance. He said the Lib Dems would resist any threat to a free and liberal society.

The opposing positions of Farron and May follow a reported row between Nick Clegg’s office and the Home Office after the ‘Sunday Times’ reported that the government was reviving a Labour plan to scrutinise on demand every phone call, text message and email sent and website accessed in real time. Which poses an interesting question. If a Labour government with a solid majority was forced to abandon such legislation, what grounds has the Prime Minister to think that he, with no Tory majority and a prospective mutiny in the Lib Dem ranks, can whip it through now?

Then he would certainly have trouble with the House of Lords. “We regard privacy and the application of executive and legislative restraint to the use of surveillance and data collection powers as necessary conditions for the exercise of individual freedom and liberty.” Not the words of a committed civil liberties campaigner but the considered opinion of the House of Lords Constitution Committee.

If the bill as reported is made law Britain will become a substantially less free country. Together with secret courts, this is among the most serious threats to freedom proposed anywhere in the democratic world, coupled with a bungling bureaucracy that keeps losing vital information. It competes with the very worst of Labour’s authoritarian laws and their obsession with personal information, which the coalition is pledged to roll back.

Can we really defend our freedom by sacrificing it? The government stress that the proposals cover data on where a call is made from, when and by whom. The authorities would still need a warrant to access the contents of such communication. But once the intelligence services and police have powers to insist that internet and phone companies hand over data without our knowledge, in a perceived crisis it would be a short step for the same people to argue that they need to start reading our communications.

The only thing that George Orwell got wrong was the year.

Back in the heady days of May 2010 a Tory and Liberal coalition agreement was produced at break-neck speed.

Section 10 of the agreement was about civil liberties. The preamble stated: “The parties agree to implement a full programme of measures to reverse the substantial erosion of civil liberties under the Labour Government and roll back state intrusion.” The agreement specifically promised the protection of historic freedoms through the defence of trial by jury.

The Protection of Freedoms Bill was a promising start. Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg said: “This is a landmark Bill which will result in an unprecedented rolling back of the power of the state. The Protection of Freedoms Bill brings together a huge range of measures to restore the hard-won British liberties that have been lost in recent years.”

A far cry from this pledge came with Ken Clarke’s Justice and Security Green Paper, produced for consultation last October. The green paper proposes using “closed material procedures” to prevent sensitive intelligence being revealed in civil courts for the first time. Claimants would not be able to see the evidence against them and ministers would be able to make initial decisions about material that should be withheld. In some cases the full judgments would not be published at the end of a civil trial.

Appearing before Parliament’s joint committee on human rights (JCHR), Clarke was forced to defend his plans against accusations that they were a corruption of the British legal system which undermined the tradition of open justice. The committee has now produced a unanimously critical report. In their view the government’s claim for secrecy is far too broad and could include, for example, actions against the police and inquests concerning deaths in custody or soldiers killed by “friendly fire.” They are concerned about the potential impact of the proposals on public trust and confidence, not only in the government but in the courts. They regretted that the green paper overlooks the very considerable impact of its proposals on the freedom and ability of the media to report on matters of public interest and concern.

In a letter to the ‘Guardian’, the director of Liberty, Shami Chakrabarti, maverick Conservative MP David Davis, Lady Kennedy QC, the former director of public prosecutions Lord Macdonald QC and others warned that the green paper “violates two of the most basic principles of our common law system: the right of every party to know the case against them, so that they can answer it; and the principle that there must be equality of arms between parties in court. It would permit secret hearings, and the giving of secret judgments by courts, accessible only to the government.”

There is a general consensus that concerns about spies and threats by the CIA to stop sharing information with UK security and intelligence agencies are what really lies behind the green paper. Ken Clarke has argued that only a tiny number of cases will be involved, and the Prime Minister has thrown his weight behind the proposals. But there are highly critical comments in the MoJ’s own appraisal of the measures, including the danger of resentment of the judicial process and unwillingness to participate in jury service because of intrusive vetting procedures.

It is an iron rule of government that when powers are left lying around someone will use or misuse them – witness the use of counter-terrorism legislation by local authorities in respect of such matters as dog fouling and whether or not children had the right to go to a particular school in a particular catchment area; and the use of section 44 stop-and-search powers, overwhelmingly against black and ethnic minority groups.

If this becomes law then the 800 years since Magna Carta could vanish at the stroke of a pen. In the wrong hands such chilling powers could prove calamitous to basic human freedoms.

Announcing two new consultations in the Commons last week – on radical proposals to strengthen community sentences and improve the Probation Service – justice secretary Ken Clarke said: “The Government’s goal is to reform sentences in the community and probation services so that they are able to both punish and reform offenders much more effectively.”

In his forward to the Community Sentences paper Ken Clarke says: “Ensuring sentences in the community are properly punitive is the counterpart of our efforts to ensure that prison sentences are properly reformative. But the aim is not just that these sentences will be seen increasingly as a credible, robust and demanding punishment by sentencers, victims and the wider public. The proposals being consulted on also seek to make sentences in the community more effective in helping wrongdoers go straight.”

Community sentences are often seen as an easy option, sometimes just a weekly meeting with a probation officer or a few hours of unpaid work in an entire week. Now, for the first time, every community sentence will include one form of punishment from a list including unpaid work, significant restrictions on liberty through a curfew with tagging, exclusion from certain areas, a foreign travel ban, a fine and a driving ban, where appropriate.

Extending the use of curfews and tagging will ensure that offenders are off the street, can’t socialise in the evening and have fewer chances to offend. There will be a new power to trial a scheme to ban offenders convicted of alcohol-fuelled crime from drinking as part of a community sentence or suspended sentences using new monitoring technology. Another new power will allow bailiffs to seize criminals’ possessions.

These proposals build on reforms in the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill, which include extending the maximum length of a curfew from 12 to 16 hours a day, from six months to 12 months and introducing foreign travel bans.

Introducing the Probation Services paper Ken Clarke says: “I believe profoundly in the importance of this vital public service, and acknowledge the excellent front-line work being done by many hard-working professionals. Whilst there has undoubtedly been a real shift in emphasis from centralised to localised delivery of services and there are many examples of innovation across probation, we want to see a step change which draws fully on the innovation, expertise and local knowledge of all sectors – public, voluntary and private – in a way which embraces competition and is genuinely open to new ways of doing things better.”

The public sector Probation Service will retain control of the management of offenders who pose the highest risk, including the most serious and violent criminals, to protect the public. But there will be competition for lower-risk offenders “to ensure that probation services are delivered by those best equipped to tackle crime and reoffending, and encourage the most effective rehabilitation measures, whether they are in the public, voluntary, or private sectors.” Payment will be by results.

Probation Trusts will be given control of local budgets, including electronic monitoring of curfews, so they can deliver programmes targeted at local needs and reducing reoffending.

Both consultations are open until 22 June, and the two consultation papers can be found at:

https://consult.justice.gov.uk/digital-communications/effective-community-services
https://consult.justice.gov.uk/digital-communications/effective-probation-services

Last week the first three firms were given approval to operate as Alternative Business Structures (ABSs) and duly licensed.
For those unfamiliar with the territory, an ABS is a firm where a non-lawyer is a manager of the firm, or has an ownership-type interest in the firm. A firm may also be an ABS where another body is a manager of the firm, or has an ownership-type interest in the firm and at least 10 per cent of that body is controlled by non-lawyers. The Legal Services Act is designed to liberalise the £23bn UK legal market by allowing companies to provide legal services, and will permit firms to float on the stock market or seek external capital. Last year justice secretary Kenneth Clarke expressed the hope that the advent of alternative business structures would have as dramatic an impact on legal services as the so-called ‘Big Bang’ of 1986 had on the financial sector.

An ABS is not limited in the services that it can offer to the public. The point of the legislation is to demystify the law, making the purchase of legal services as simple for consumers as buying a tin of beans, and thus it became known as “Tesco Law.” But Co-operative Legal Services is one of the first firms licensed as an ABS, with Tescos so far nowhere in sight. The Co-op’s ambitions to expand its legal offering have been far from a secret, including the launch of a fixed-fee family law service later this year, handling legal aid work, and offering face-to-face legal advice through the Co-op’s bank network, which, if its bid for Lloyds branches is successful, would give it around 1,000 locations.
To mark the occasion justice minister Jonathan Djanogly visited Co-operative Legal Services Headquarters in Bristol to talk to staff and customers about the reforms.

He said: “This is a huge milestone for UK legal services and the future of Alternative Business Structures. ABSs introduce more competition in the market place, delivering competitive pricing, higher standards of product and more choice for the consumer.
Our UK legal services are unrivalled around the world and these changes will allow them to reach new heights, as solicitors’ firms develop new markets, seek external investment and join up with other businesses to offer different products to consumers and provide opportunities for growth.”

In response Eddie Ryan, Managing Director of Co-operative Legal Services, said: “We are committed to playing a leading role in this new era by offering straightforward value-for-money expert legal services, backed by an ethos of social responsibility and a level of protection that can be provided by a diverse, multi-billion pound organisation.”

Another new license holder is Lawbridge Solicitors Ltd, based in Sidcup, Kent. This is an existing solo practice run by Michael Pope, handling employment work, litigation and commercial/corporate legal services. His wife Alison, currently the practice manager, will become a director of the firm with a significant shareholding. The third new license holder is John Welch and Stammers, a long-standing generalist law firm in Witney, Oxfordshire. Bernadette Summers, who has been practice manager for the past 12 years, will be appointed as a non-lawyer managing partner.

The Solicitors Regulation Authority has to date received around 60 stage 2 applications to become ABSs, and a further 120 stage 1 expressions of interest.

The Backbench Business Committee meets every week to consider requests for debates from any backbench Members of Parliament on any subject. The motion selected for debate on Tuesday concerned assisted suicide.

The proposed motion welcomed the Director of Public Prosecution’s Policy to Prosecutors in Respect of Cases of Encouraging or Assisting Suicide, which was published in February 2010. The policy identifies sixteen public interest factors in favour of prosecution. These include: victims under 18 years of age; or who did not have the capacity to reach an informed decision to commit suicide; had not reached a voluntary, clear, settled and informed decision to commit suicide; and had not clearly and unequivocally communicated his or her decision to commit suicide to the suspect. Other factors include: the suspect was not wholly motivated by compassion; or pressured the victim to commit suicide; did not take reasonable steps to ensure that any other person had not pressured the victim to commit suicide; or had a history of violence or abuse against the victim.

The six public interest factors against prosecution, listed in the Policy, include: the victim had reached a voluntary, clear, settled and informed decision to commit suicide; the suspect was wholly motivated by compassion; and the actions of the suspect, although sufficient to come within the definition of the crime, were of only minor encouragement or assistance. DPP Keir Starmer stressed that the policy does not in any way decriminalise the offence of encouraging or assisting suicide, and nothing in the Policy can be taken to amount to an assurance that a person will not be prosecuted if he or she does an act that encourages or assists the suicide or the attempted suicide of another person.
Opening the debate, Conservative MP Richard Ottaway acknowledged it is a sensitive area of law which evokes deep emotions. Labour MP Dame Joan Ruddock introduced her amendment inviting the government to consult on whether to put the DPP’s guidance on a statutory basis. Another amendment, supported by more than 85 MPs, called for “further development of specialist palliative care and hospice provision.”

Conservative MP Guy Opperman used the debate to call for a full consultation on legalising assisted suicide. Fellow Conservative Edward Leigh said he was “opposed to euthanasia in any shape or form” but regarded the guidelines as “a fair compromise.”

Frank Field (Lab) expressed a note of dissent. He said: “Member after Member has risen to congratulate the House on the quality of the debate…I think there has been a considerable amount of cant and deceit…This has been the debate that dare not enter its name on the Order Paper, as it is, in fact, a debate about euthanasia.”

Caroline Lucas (Green) said: “I welcome the clarification provided by the DPP’s guidelines. There is no doubt that those who maliciously or irresponsibly encourage suicide should be prosecuted, and I do not think that anyone is saying otherwise. However, it is not in the public interest to prosecute a normally law-abiding citizen who, out of love and compassion, helps a loved one to die.”

Jacob Rees-Mogg (Con) said: “I start as a Catholic, and I believe that human life is sacred…We have to legislate for the weak and vulnerable, and for those who have nobody to defend them… What about those who feel that they have become a burden to society? My greatest concern (is) for the elderly and the frail.”

After a long, passionate and emotional debate it was Resolved, without division, “That this House welcomes the Director of Public Prosecution’s Policy to Prosecutors in Respect of Cases of Encouraging or Assisting Suicide, published in February 2010, and encourages further development of specialist palliative care and hospice provision.” This parliamentary endorsement of the guidelines is likely to be seen as providing further reassurance to those who travel abroad with loved ones so that they can end their lives.

Having already forced nine amendments during the report stage of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders bill, peers inflicted further damage on the legislation at the third reading stage of the bill on Tuesday.

Baroness Grey-Thompson (Crossbench), the former paralympian, put down an amendment opposing government plans to save £6m a year by removing as many as 6,000 children from entitlement to legal support. She said: “If the Bill is left as it stands, legal aid for around 35,000 children every year will continue, but legal aid will not be available for around 6,000 children under 18 who would qualify if the current rules remained in place.”

She said that children, by virtue of their age and capacity, will not be able to present their case effectively in the majority of proceedings. She concluded: “To deny children, the most vulnerable in our society, the ability to access legal aid without any understanding of what the wider consequences would be is not something we should accept.” On division the amendment was agreed by 232 – 220.

Lord Cormack (Conservative) moved the next, related, amendment concerning children and clinical negligence. He said: “If, in the care of the NHS someone is damaged through clinical negligence then there should be an automatic right of redress. That is more particularly the case when we come to children, and that is what the amendment focuses on.” The House agreed the amendment by 228 – 215.

The government also made several concessions. Firstly they accepted an amendment that the lord chancellor could bring back into the scope categories of legal aid without the need for primary legislation. Secondly they conceded legal aid for victims of child abduction in the United Kingdom as well as for cases abroad. And finally they agreed to bring into the scope of legal aid cases in which the victims of human trafficking seek damages in either the civil courts or an employment tribunal. They would also provide legal aid to this group for immigration advice.

The government could however celebrate eight divisions that went their way. Closest was a second tied vote, this time on a proposal by Lord Pannick (Crossbench) covering the exceptional cases category for legal aid. He argued that the government’s proposal to include an exceptional cases category was too narrow and failed to meet its purpose. “That is because the exceptional cases category set out in the clause applies only if the refusal of legal aid would amount to a breach of rights under the European Convention on Human Rights or would create a risk of doing so”, he said. The vote was tied at 201 – 201, and therefore the amendment was defeated.

The other seven government successes came on motions concerning legal aid for vulnerable young people; the homeless; conditional fee agreements; success fees; restorative justice; victims of international corporate human rights abuse; and the timing of the bill’s implementation.

The bill now returns to the Commons for consideration of amendments on 17 April. This will be the government’s opportunity to seek to reverse some or all of the defeats inflicted by the Lords.