The Lords continued their examination of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill on Monday, starting with Clause 8, which makes provisions about when civil legal services would be made available.

Amendment 21 was moved by Lord Beecham. He said that the bill sought to make legal aid provision a matter of exception rather than of course. Instead of listing only matters that would be eligible for legal aid, they exclude everything except those matters that are contained within the clause. The amendment would reverse the way that the Government are putting matters. It was withdrawn without being put to the vote.

Amendment 22, moved by Lord Faulks, concerned Clause 8(2), which gives the Lord Chancellor the power to modify Part 1 of Schedule 1 so as to omit services from the scope of legal aid and assistance. He said that the power would allow the Lord Chancellor to remove areas from the scope of legal aid without proper debate on the Floor of the House. After debate, he said: “I very much hope that, when this matter comes back on Report, those concerns can be reflected by the Minister. In that guise, I am happy to withdraw this amendment.” Amendments 23 to 27 were not moved.

Consideration moved on to Schedule 1: Civil legal services. Amendment 28 was moved by Lord Lloyd of Berwick, one of a group of amendments concerning clinical negligence proceedings and expert reports. All the amendments were directed towards the retention of legal aid in clinical negligence cases. Lord Wigley said: “Many people involved in cases arising from clinical negligence by a public authority are among the most destitute…Considering the inequality of arms that inevitably arises, having access to expert reports is vital. To put this debate into context, there are about 1 million adverse accidents in the NHS every year.” The debate – described as “very thoughtful” because so many of those who participated had experience, either legal or medical, of cases of this kind – looked at the best way to fund the expert report and resulted in the amendment’s withdrawal pending further figures from the government. Amendments 29 to 31 were not moved.

Baroness Doocey proposed amendment 32, relating to the ability of claimants, the majority of whom are disabled, to appeal against decisions on their entitlement to welfare benefits. She said that the Bill as it stands would remove social welfare cases from the scope of legal aid. “The need for such legal aid is best demonstrated by the fact that nearly 40 per cent of all appeals against work capability assessment decisions are upheld.” After a lively debate and a robust response from minister Lord McNally, Baroness Doocey said: “I really hope that the Minister will reflect again and consider bringing back some hope at Report stage. Meanwhile, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.”

Baroness O’Loan proposed amendment 33, which sought to restore families with dependent children to the list of those eligible for legal aid and advice. She said: “Some 650,000 of the poorest people will be deprived of the access that they currently have through solicitors, CAB law centres and other advice centres…140,000 children will be affected by the proposed measures as legal aid is withdrawn from the adults who care for them, and…at least 6,000 children will be deprived of legal aid altogether.” In response to the debate, Lord McNally said: “I am not waving a white handkerchief and making specific concessions, but I take the point made by the noble and learned Baroness in closing that this has been an array of experience and expertise that we would do well to consider, and this we will do before we bring these matters back on Report. I ask the noble Baroness, Lady O’Loan, who started this debate, whether she will now withdraw her amendment.” She did.

More to come, with day four scheduled for Wednesday, 18 January.

alt="Creative Commons Licence [Some Rights Reserved]" src="http://creativecommons.org/images/public/somerights20.gif" />   © Copyright Stephen Richards and
licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.

Barristers are renewing their efforts to capture the territory that has traditionally been the preserve of solicitors. To this end two initiatives have been launched.

The public access scheme was first established in 2004 and allows a barrister to be instructed directly by a lay client without the need for a solicitor. In order to take on public access work a barrister must have more than three years’ practising experience, must be properly trained and must have registered with the Bar Council as a public access practitioner. One stumbling block has been payment of barristers by clients.

In his inaugural speech to the Bar Council on Monday, Michael Todd QC, Chairman-Elect, confirmed that he is “chairing a Working Group, essentially led again by the Member Services Team, to look at the feasibility of a service which would provide BSB-regulated entities and Public Access barristers with an escrow account facility in which can be placed ‘client monies’ and which will be administered centrally from one location by a third party.” He said: “Already considerable interest has been displayed by a number of potential providers of this service.”

He told the Bar Council: “We have no entitlement to work. We must compete for it. We must invest better to adapt, to change, and to flourish. The returns on such investment are, in my view, undeniable.” He went on to say: “Of a Bar of about 15,000 members, nearly 5,000 are now ‘Public Access’ trained. They have made an investment in their future.” In his CrimeLine twitter

Andrew Keogh confirms that: “My police rep courses are mainly filled with barristers at the moment.”

Then on Wednesday last week the Bar Standards Board (BSB), the regulatory body for barristers in England and Wales, announced that it is consulting on amendments to its Code of Conduct for barristers following a review of its public access rules. The BSB said: “Public access rules do not allow a client who may be eligible for public funding to instruct a public access barrister. This is one of the rules the BSB seeks to change. The consultation also suggests that barristers should have a duty to ensure that, before accepting public access instructions, the client is able to make an informed decision about whether to apply for legal aid or to proceed with public access representation.” The lifting of the ban on barristers with under three years’ practising experience from accepting public access instructions is also proposed.

The BSB claim that the change would improve client choice and provide greater access to justice for clients who find themselves without access to legal aid solicitors. Removing the three-year rule and allowing barristers to do direct access work from the time they qualify would expand consumer choice, create greater competition and increase the supply of high quality and competitively priced advocacy services.

According to the Law Gazette, the consultation paper states: “The purpose of allowing lay clients to instruct barristers directly is to remove unnecessary barriers to the provision of barristers’ services and to save costs by cutting out superfluous intermediaries.”

The consultation will close at 5pm on 9 March 2012, and the consultation paper can be found at:
http://www.barstandardsboard.org.uk/assets/documents/Public%20access%20consultation%20paper%20new.pdf
PS: “Escrow generally refers to the placing of property which is the subject of a commercial transaction (money, title deeds, software source code, etc.,) into the hands of a trusted third party for safekeeping until some specified event occurs which will trigger the release of the property to one party to the initial transaction.” (Out-Law.com)

On Monday the Law Society announced that, jointly with the Ministry of Justice and the Legal Services Board, it intended to commission research to understand more about ‘high street’ law firms, the main providers of legal services and legal aid.

The aim of the research is to understand more about the providers of legal services ahead of regulatory changes, the reforms to legal aid, and other significant changes in the legal sector. This research will act as an initial baseline with the potential for follow-up research to be commissioned at a later date to measure the impact of changes once they have bedded in.

The Law Society needs information from a large and nationally representative sample of legal service suppliers. The research will probably take the form of telephone interviews with 2,000 senior representatives from law firms operating in England and Wales. A significant sub-group of this sample should be legal aid suppliers. Given that most legal services are supplied by smaller law firms the Society proposes to exclude the largest 200 firms (in terms of turnover) from the research, unless the firm is a legal aid provider.

The research will consist of three stages. Stage 1 will be an evaluation of a draft questionnaire provided by MoJ, LSB and LS, and a definition of sampling strategy. Stage 2 will be the main stage fieldwork, consisting of 20 minute interviews with senior representatives from 2,000 law firms across England and Wales. Stage 3 will be the analysis of survey results, together with the written report and presentation of the results. The findings from this research will be used to produce a state of the market report and to inform the on-going work of the three sponsoring bodies.

Stage 1 is expected to take place mid January 2012 – mid March 2012; stage 2 is expected to take place mid March 2012 – end May 2012; and stage 3 is expected to take place beginning Jun 2012 – end July 2012.
Expressions of interest from consortia of institutions (eg joining expertise in legal services with social survey capacity and expertise) are encouraged, although tenders from individual institutions are also welcome. But if you are interested in tendering you will have to be quick. Expressions of interest should arrive at the Law Society no later than 10.00 Monday 5 December 2011.

More details of the evidence being sought and the expected outputs for each stage can be found in the Law Society’s release at:

http://www.lawsociety.org.uk/newsandevents/news/view=newsarticle.law?NEWSID=444155

A new system of regulation for the legal profession has been introduced. In a move away from a rules based approach, outcomes focused regulation (OFR) is the Solicitors Regulation Authority’s (SRA) new approach.

The SRA will be implementing OFR from 6 October 2011. It claims to be outcomes focused and risk based, and aims to provide clients with services that are tailored to their particular needs. OFR means that firms and practitioners will have greater flexibility in establishing how they can achieve the best outcomes for their clients. The SRA has published a handbook which underpins the regulation of solicitors, law firms and alternative business structures (ABS). It brings together all of the SRA’s regulatory requirements into a single structure and underpins the regulation of solicitors, law firms and ABS. It sets out ethical standards that the SRA expects of law firms and practitioners, and the outcomes that it expects practitioners to achieve for their clients.

The SRA claims that OFR in practice means a different way of thinking and operating. There are ten principles. Most of these are similar to the core duties contained in the current Code of Conduct, but there are some new ones. They now stand alone at the beginning of the handbook and underpin all of the regulatory requirements. The SRA say that whenever a regulatory issue is to be considered the first point of reference should always be the principles. They apply to everyone the SRA regulate, not just solicitors in traditional firms and in-house practice but also, in due course, to new entrants to the legal services market such as non-lawyer managers of ABS.

So far so good. But what has really ruffled feathers are allegations that customers who go to law firms are too often left in ignorance about progress in their case, then burdened with a huge bill at the end of proceeedings. According to the ‘Guardian’, at the launch of OFR the chief executive of the SRA, Antony Townsend, said there were instances of gross overcharging, and that consumers needed to be given more information about costs. In their research the key concerns that had come from consumers were to do with information. He said: “The biggest worries were lack of clear expectations and a lack of clarity about charging. Clients feel they don’t know what’s going on, there are delays that are unexplained and they are handed a huge bill at the end…There are some cases of gross overcharging and we do take action, but we are not a price regulator. Where someone has been grossly exploited we will take action.” When asked if a double-dip recession would trigger a fresh outbreak of embezzlement cases among lawyers he replied: “Yes. Small firms are operating in a very difficult environment. In desperate times solicitors may borrow money from the clients’ account and it goes from bad to worse.”

If comments posted on the Linkedin website are typical then there is acceptance that this is a great opportunity to explain to the public the level of service they can expect from a solicitor. But there is resentment that the solicitors’ own regulatory authority should portray the profession as a bunch of overcharging embezzlers. Rather the authority should be highlighting the good practice of so many in the legal profession.

Unnecessary legislation

One of the commitments in the Coalition Agreement was the repeal of unnecessary or outdated legislation. The government is now consulting on a bill to implement this commitment.

The Ministry of Justice is collating suggestions for repeal based on the following criteria:

  petty restrictions;
  government over-interference in people’s lives;
  unnecessary criminal offences;
  unnecessary regulations;
  obsolete laws;
  excessive layers of law;
  duplication;
  laws that inform or guide rather than impose an obligation;
  EU and health and safety gold-plating, where gold-plating can be identified;      bye-laws that impose unnecessary restrictions on people’s lives.

The Law Society wants to know what legislation you believe should be repealed or retained, and why. The Society says that it is in a position to have a significant impact on the bill’s shape and content, and would like members to play a role in this process. It is anticipated that the bill will be published in 2012. Members are encouraged to suggest:

  specific proposals for legislative repeal, including both primary and secondary     
  legislation;
  further potential categories of repeal;
  views on the suggested categories/structuring of the bill.

The Law Society asks you to send your views to:

consultationresponse@lawsociety.org.uk

Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke has expressed the hope that the advent of alternative business structures could have as dramatic an impact on legal services as the so-called ‘Big Bang’ of 1986 had on the financial sector.

He was speaking on Wednesday at the CityUK Future Litigation event held at the offices of Clifford Chance. He said: “As for domestic regulation, we are less than a month away from an historic change – the introduction of Alternative Business Structures on October 6 that will allow solicitors, barristers and other professionals to combine together in new ways, should they choose to, for the benefit of the consumer. Time will tell, but I hope that comparisons with the Big Bang in 1986 do not prove entirely fanciful.”

The Big Bang refers to Margaret Thatcher’s deregulation of financial markets in 1986, which involved measures including abolition of fixed commission charges, of the distinction between stockjobbers and stockbrokers, and the move to electronic, screen-based trading. The day the London Stock Exchange’s rules changed, 27 October 1986, was dubbed ‘Big Bang Day’. The effects of Big Bang were dramatic, with London’s place as a financial capital decisively strengthened.

For many lawyers the advent of ABS is nothing less than Armageddon, and the justice secretary conceded he was aware that some voices have expressed a “degree of nervousness about ABSs.” He said that his intention is that the new structures will be of benefit both to the economy and to the profession by improving growth in the legal services market, whilst protecting standards. “Through allowing law firms and Chambers in England and Wales to access capital, ABSs could provide greater flexibility to serve clients, increase competition and afford new opportunities for global expansion into legal services”, he said. He was conscious that this is a time of uncertainty, with particular concerns regarding the pace of change, the fate of smaller firms and the implications for quality. But he affirmed: “My priority is that ABSs help firms to work together in an economically viable set-up and that’s why we’ve taken our time in trying to get the regulatory framework right. It is important that consumers, no matter whether using a traditional law firm or a new ABS firm, are provided with first class service and protection.”

Which is fine, and no-one is arguing the toss on that point anymore. The concern is that lawyers themselves will allow the fear of this change to stop them like rabbits in the headlamps when they should regard themselves as having the upper hand. It is they that have dominated the legal marketplace for centuries and they who have all the experience. Changing the way they sell and operate is what the fight it about, not changing the work they do. Tesco law remains the stalking horse but it is time to make sure that club card points don’t ever become a substitute for great legal services.

Image courtesy of conservativeparty’s photostream on flickr

Last week the government announced its intention to ban the payment of referral fees in personal injury cases. In their view the current arrangements have led to high costs, encouraged a compensation culture and led to the growth of an industry – estimated elsewhere to be worth £3bn a year – which pursues claimants for profit.

Though the MoJ stress there is no universally recognised definition of ‘referral fees’, their press release gives the following example:

• You have an accident and you are induced through a TV advert or SMS text message to make a ‘no-win, no-fee’ claim.
• Your claim is passed between claims management companies (who advertise compensation claims for accidents), insurance companies, lawyers and others who charge each other a referral fee for ‘referring’ the claim up the line.
• The lawyer sues for compensation. If he wins, he can recover his costs and his “no-win, no-fee” mark-up on his costs from the losing defendant (or often the defendant’s insurance company) which will cover the amount he paid out as a referral fee. So the lawyer may pay hundreds of pounds as a referral fee because he knows he can get the money back.
• To cover the loss, losing insurance companies are forced to raise premiums, private companies are forced to put up prices, and public authorities pass the burden on to the taxpayer.

Justice minister Jonathan Djanogly said: “Honest motorists are seeing their premiums hiked up as insurance companies cover the increasing costs of more and more compensation claims. Many of the claims are spurious and only happen because the current system allows too many people to profit from minor accidents and incidents. People are being encouraged to sue, at no risk to themselves, leaving schools, business and individuals living in fear of being dragged to the courts for simply going about daily life.”

The announcement has been received with almost universal approval by the insurance industry. Shadow justice minister Andy Slaughter said Labour supported the ban, particularly when applied to road accidents. But Neil Rose, writing in legalweek.com, reckoned that the ban was politics not policy, made for show and for headlines. He said: “If ministers really want rid of claims management companies, then ban them, not referral fees. But they know they can’t do that, because these businesses will just become alternative business structures and do the whole case themselves, a move that was likely anyway but that this announcement will surely speed up.”

The justice minister said finding a definition of referral fees was challenging, but he hoped to get the provisions included in the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill, possibly by Easter next year. The government’s current proposals before Parliament in clause 41 of that bill focus on stopping losing defendants having to pay a ‘success fee’ to reimburse the claimant’s lawyer for unconnected cases he may have lost. In future the person making the claim will have to pay the success fee rather than the defendant, and that fee will be capped. Legal costs overall should fall, meaning lower costs to pass on to customers.

Margaret Thatcher’s priorities for the police were always clear. They were cosseted. Numbers, pay, overtime, the sky seemed to be the limit. Cynics would say that it was insurance for her contentious domestic policies, whether taking on the miners or introducing the poll tax.

David Cameron has been very different. It is almost as if he is determined to be confrontational, with swingeing cuts in budgets and numbers and a pay freeze. There have been critical speeches about police performance, culminating in the unseemly and very public spat about the initial reaction to the recent urban riots. Not to mention the blame game of the phone tapping scandal.

So there was perhaps an element of fence mending in home secretary Theresa May’s hastily arranged speech to police leaders on Tuesday. She went out of her way to praise the police for the handling of the riots. “We owe all police officers a debt of gratitude,” she said. “They risk their own safety day in, day out to protect ours. And I want to take this opportunity to pay tribute to our police leaders, who made those changes that led to the restoration of order on our streets. They worked tirelessly in leading their officers through a difficult time, and they deserve much credit for that.” But there was no resiling from the proposed cuts. “ The police are going to have to take their share of the burden. People often say there will be twenty per cent police cuts.  And that’s true”, she said.

The home secretary then dealt with extra powers for the police to deal with any future disturbances. In a key section of her speech she said: “We have already said that we will give the police new powers, including new gang injunctions for young people and the right to remove face coverings, as well as considering new curfew powers.  For example, under existing laws, there is no power to impose a general curfew in a particular area, and while curfew conditions can be placed on some offenders as part of their ASBO, criminal sentence or bail conditions, there are only limited powers to impose them on somebody under the age of sixteen.  Those are the sorts of changes we need to consider. So we will make sure the police have the powers they need.”

Apart from practical implications – can you imagine local curfews in Olympics year? – this approach has met with some opposition. Mairi Clare Rodgers, Director of Media Relations at Liberty, said that more inclusion, fairness and equal treatment before the law, not less, is the only way to build personal and social responsibility. Politicians should listen when police chiefs tell them that new powers – on curfews, dispersals and face-coverings – are unnecessary. “We fail to see how leaning on magistrates to lock up youngsters and evicting entire families – innocent siblings and all – from their homes – is justified. Crude spite is flawed, both in theory and practice, and will lead to more problems than it solves. Shutting down entire phone and social media networks – punishing innocent users and those warning others of violence – is as useless as it is disproportionate”, she said.

Maria Fort, of Big Brother Watch, said that, while individual curfews are acceptable, blanket curfews are more controversial. “It springs images of war-time suppression and martial law on societies.  Even in crises of public order, there is no justification for denying the general public such basic liberties, particularly when the vast majority of the public are law-abiding individuals.”

The full text of the home secretary’s speech can be found at:
http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/media-centre/speeches/urgent-need-reform

Photo courtesy of nikolaasB’s photostream

When Ryan Giggs and Imogen Thomas embarked on a brief relationship they could not have imagined that it would develop from kiss-and-tell to a legal battle and now into a constitutional crisis.

On 14 April Mr Justice Eady granting a privacy injunction to Ryan Giggs. When Giggs’s anonymity was blown on Twitter, Thomas, now supported by the “Sun” (NGN), headed back into court to challenge the injunction. Mr Justice Eady released a trenchantly-worded judgment, explaining why he had made the initial ruling to keep the identity of the footballer secret, in which he concluded there was “ample reason not to trust” the young woman. The judge noted that evidence before the court “appeared strongly to suggest that the claimant [the anonymous footballer] was being blackmailed.” Eady did not reach a final conclusion on the point but, in refusing the application, he added: “It is important always to remember that the modern law of privacy is not concerned solely with secrets: it is also concerned importantly with intrusion”.

Within the hour John Hemming MP named Giggs in the House of Commons under parliamentary privilege. NGN immediately made a further application for the anonymity of the claimant to be removed on the basis that the name had been repeated thousands of times on the internet. In a brief, three paragraph ruling, Mr Justice Tugendhat refused the application. The third paragraph is worth repeating in full, confirming that privacy expands to cover intrusion and harassment:
“It is obvious that if the purpose of this injunction were to preserve a secret, it would have failed in its purpose. But in so far as its purpose is to prevent intrusion or harassment, it has not failed. The fact that tens of thousands of people have named the claimant on the internet confirms that the claimant and his family need protection from intrusion into their private and family life. The fact that a question has been asked in Parliament seems to me to increase, and not to diminish the strength of his case that he and his family need that protection. The order has not protected the claimant and his family from taunting on the internet. It is still effective to protect them from taunting and other intrusion and harassment in the print media.”

There has been fury in some parliamentary quarters, with indignation that the judiciary was usurping the legislative rights of parliament. Senior legal figures and politicians warned that super-injunctions have been rendered pointless by Twitter and other social networking sites, leaving the law on so-called gagging orders in a “complete mess”. But Eady was doing what parliament had asked the courts to do when it passed the Human Rights Act (HRA), which is to weigh up privacy and freedom of expression as embodied in articles 8 and 10 of the HRA. David Cameron said that Parliament had not provided judges with sufficient guidance, forcing them to rely on legislation from the European Courts. He said: “I think judges are saying, look there is a European Convention of Human Rights which we can use. And because Parliament has not discussed this enough, they feel they are filling a gap…We have such extensive social media and internet access that everything becomes more intense.”

The Lord Chief Justice, Lord Judge, weighed into the debate. He said: “Contrary to some commentary, judges in this country did not create privacy rights. They were created by Parliament. Now they have been created, judges cannot ignore them – they must apply the law.” He warned MPs that hiding behind ¬parliamentary privilege was not a clear cut defence for flouting court orders. He admitted that bloggers and users of social networking sites such as Twitter would not necessarily be covered by injunctions. But he added that the internet had “by no means the same degree of intrusion into privacy as the story being emblazoned on the front pages of newspapers”, which “people trust more.” Society should consider other ways to bring Twitter and other internet sites under control. He said: “Anybody can put anything on it, modern technology is totally out of control. I’m not giving up on the possibility that people who peddle lies about others through using technology may one day be brought under control, maybe through damages, very substantial damages, maybe even injunctions to stop them peddling lies.”

Following the publication by the Master of the Rolls, Lord Neuberger, of the findings of his committee on injunctions, Attorney General Dominic Grieve announced that a joint committee of peers and MPs would investigate the use of court injunctions to protect privacy. He said it would examine whether the current system was working following recent controversy over super-injunctions.

Photo courtesy of  Edwin. 11 photostream on Flickr

After the battering the Government’s legal aid proposals took in the Commons it was the turn of the Lords to sink their teeth in when the proposals were the subject of a debate last Thursday.

Opening the debate, Lord Beeching pointed out that the Government’s Green Paper on legal aid reform proposes a massive cut in the civil legal aid budget of £279 million, with a much smaller reduction of around £71 million in the criminal legal aid budget. It achieves this by substantially reducing the scope of the scheme across most of the categories currently covered, while several categories are removed entirely. He said that, based on the latest Legal Services Commission data, some 725,000 cases will not be assisted, adding that the impact is concentrated on the poorest. Currently, 80 per cent of legal help cases and 90 per cent of cases where legal representation is funded involve the poorest 20 per cent of the population. As regards alternative sources of support, he said that law centres and Citizens Advice are under extreme financial pressure, both from the withdrawal of government funding implicit in the proposals of the Green Paper and from local councils struggling to cope with the largest ever reduction in government grants. He urged the Government to consider very carefully the Law Society’s proposals for savings which he reckoned could bring a total of £469 million-worth of savings. He quoted the current Lord Chief Justice as saying that the proposals fail “to recognise the depth of the problem,” and “would lead to a huge increase in the incidence of unrepresented litigants, with serious implications for the quality of justice and for the administration of the justice system.”

Baroness Sherlock focused on one particular aspect of the Government’s plans for legal aid, the proposal to take social welfare law out of scope. She said that of the cuts to be made, more than £l00 million will be cut from social welfare legal aid and, as a result, most social welfare law and legal advice will no longer be covered. This is at a time when the Welfare Reform Bill, described as the biggest change to the welfare system for over 60 years, is currently making its way through Parliament. She concluded: “My concern is that when Governments make changes on this scale, mistakes inevitably happen. Given all those changes, does this feel like a good time to stop providing advice and help to benefits claimants in those settings? I think not.” Lord Thomas’s concern was medical negligence, his fear being that the removal of legal aid “will deny access to justice to some of the most vulnerable groups in the country – children, the sick and disabled. The need to streamline costs and for systems to be efficient should not be at their expense.”

Baroness Helena Kennedy drew attention to something Jonathan Djanogly, the justice department Minister in charge of legal aid, said at the Conservative Party conference last year. He said: “Legal aid can be a good filler for those lawyers out of work or women who want to get back into the legal job market after having children.” Baroness Kennedy said: “It shows an attitude to legal aid which is to misunderstand it.” Her concern was also medical negligence cases, saying that “removing legal aid completely will mean that poor people who suffer terrible things within our hospitals will not be able to sue.”

Replying to the lengthy debate, Minister of State Lord McNally said: “We are still in consultation. I cannot say that the consultation is going to produce some Pauline conversion at the last moment. As I say, we have made a commitment to savings and we intend to deliver them.” Then, like Jonathan Djanogly in the Commons earlier, he played a dead bat. A contributor to the BBC’s online commentary while the debate was taking place said: “Poor McNally, poor performance. Mostly today…he’s just reading out word for word the introduction to the Green Paper published last November. Does he know? Pretty disrespectful to the House if he does. Civil servants in MoJ can’t be bothered to write him a speech and he can’t be bothered to check.” Another contributor said: “Only one speaker in favour of the reforms…That sums up the whole debate perfectly. Nobody was interested in seeking to defend what the government is doing, even those on the government benches.”

Picture courtesy of UK Parliament’s photostream