As lawyers begin to focus on the Clementi reforms, Jon Robins investigates the extent of legal influence on government


If solicitors thought they were going to receive special dispensation at the hands of a government featuring as many lawyers as new Labour when it came to power, they were quickly disabused of any such foolish notions.


‘When Margaret Thatcher was prime minister, it was said to have set back the cause of women’s rights no end. In the same way, having so many lawyers in the Government hasn’t actually helped lawyers in any way,’ reflects Mark Harvey, the secretary of the Association of Personal Injury Lawyers (APIL) and a partner at south Wales law firm Hugh James.


Despite what the sceptics might say, the profession appears to retain some clout with ministerial colleagues. Just before Christmas, a high-powered delegation from the Law Society and Bar Council met with Prime Minister Tony Blair at Downing Street to discuss issues such as Sir David Clementi’s review of regulation of the legal profession and the need for a properly funded commercial court.


Law Society chief executive Janet Paraskeva also took the opportunity to bang the drum for legal aid practitioners when she called on the prime minister to ring-fence an ever-shrinking civil legal aid bill from all-consuming criminal costs. ‘Spending on very high-cost criminal legal aid cases pre-empts resources which should be allocated to civil legal aid and spent on issues of social exclusion,’ she argued.


There was a time when Parliament was seemingly full of lawyers, especially barristers, making it a powerful lobby. There are currently more than 60, with a majority of barristers. But do they have political influence these days? It is a particularly important question in the year that the government – if it is re-elected – is going to start work on implementing the Clementi review.


‘They still have a lot of impact,’ claims John Ludlow, head of the Law Society’s parliamentary unit. ‘It’s difficult to overturn or take the harm out of legislation but we can make a real difference.’


Mr Ludlow, a lobbyist who worked for the likes of foreign secretary Jack Straw and former Nato general secretary George Robertson when they were front- bench MPs in the late 1980s, estimates that Chancery Lane played an active part in the creation of half of the 30 Bills and nine draft Bills that featured in last year’s Queen’s Speech. It is a contribution which, he points out, is possibly greater than any other organisation.


City law firm Clifford Chance is one of the few practices to employ a lobbyist, Hilary Plattern, for non-fee-earning parliamentary work. Her predecessor as director of public policy, Richard Thomas, is now Information Commissioner. This year she has been working on issues affecting the profession, including Sir David Clementi’s review and the possibility of having cameras in courts, through to law reform, such as harmonisation of European contract law and freedom of information.


There is ‘no comparison’ between the respective influences on policymakers of lawyers in the US and in Britain, says Ms Plattern, who formerly worked for the Finance and Leasing Association. ‘US lawyers expect to be involved in the political process,’ she says.


‘Here, lawyers are comfortable with the technical aspects of legislation but not comfortable with the pure politics of it. Party politics makes them uncomfortable, and I think it’s a fear of upsetting the clients.’


Lawyers’ political power ‘depends upon which lawyers and in what cause’, reckons Mr Harvey. Law reform is the reason why APIL exists. ‘We are there to represent the victims of accidents and we aren’t a lawyers’ trade union – it is a fact that sometimes we have to remind our members of,’ he says. The group has worked hard on the campaign for corporate manslaughter legislation, which finally made it into last year’s Queen’s Speech.


APIL hosted a parliamentary reception at the House of Commons last month. According to Mr Harvey, claimant lawyers are beginning to win the debate about the existence or otherwise of a compensation culture at a government level. They take heart from the Lord Chancellor’s recent call for ‘an injection of common sense’ into the debate when he responded to the Better Regulation Task Force report on claims. Lord Falconer agreed with the task force’s finding that a ‘compensation culture’ did not really exist in the UK but there was a ‘have-a-go’ culture.


‘Lord Falconer effectively backed what we have been saying,’ says Mr Harvey. ‘The point about a “have-a-go” culture is that it might mean someone with a claim comes to see a lawyer but it doesn’t mean that the lawyer has a go for them. That’s the beauty of “no win, no fee” – the lawyer sends away the more bizarre cases.’


Meanwhile, family lawyers see their imprint on the recent Civil Partnership Bill, also in the Queen’s Speech. For more than four years, the Solicitors Family Law Association (SFLA) has been campaigning for ‘safety net’ legislation to protect unmarried couples who believe the myth of the common law wife and are left vulnerable by the lack of legal recognition of their relationship. ‘It was unlikely that the government would consider what we were seeking without passing first a Civil Partnership Bill as the first stage,’ explains SFLA communications director Louisa Cross.


In the end, the lawyers came to the aid of ministers when Tory MPs tabled a series of wrecking amendments to expand civil partnership to other family members. ‘Our role here was to explain to peers and MPs the effect of the amendments and illustrate the absurdity of trying to fit other family members into a framework intended for couples and based on civil marriage,’ Ms Cross says. ‘We were seen as an independent authoritative source with experience of applying the law in practice.’ The SFLA’s role was acknowledged in the Lords and it received ‘a very nice letter thanking us for our support’ from the Women and Equality minister Jacqui Smith.


‘Now we’re back to our original campaign objective to urge the government to address the question of what to do about unmarried and unregistered couples – some progress is being made and the Law Commission will be undertaking a focused piece of work on this in 2005,’ Ms Cross says. The SFLA together with the Law Society is now providing ministers with a draft Bill to demonstrate how our proposals could be implemented.


There are bound to be examples of successes and failures. Near-constant lobbying over legal aid rates over the past decade or so has yielded little – perhaps because it is the Treasury that needs to be convinced. But then in June, the bar managed to secure extra cash for dealing with very high-cost criminal cases after a campaign within Whitehall that many saw as a prime example of the pull it still exerts on government.


Such is the sense of the bar’s greater influence that at the press briefing to mark publication of his report last month, one of the first questions posed to Sir David Clementi was whether he feared the bar lobbying against his recommendations, which have the potential to impose massive change on barristers more than any other type of lawyer. In the early years of the new Labour government, there was a feeling that the bar had been unpleasantly surprised by how it suffered at times at the hands of, primarily, Lord Irvine – such as over the extension of solicitors’ audience rights – but that has abated in recent times.


Most of the Law Society’s parliamentary work is done behind the scenes: responding to consultation papers, providing evidence for select committees, and lobbying politicians. But according to Mr Ludlow, solicitors do not shrink from taking on a more confrontational approach with ministers if it is necessary. The most recent example was the Housing Act, which received royal assent last year, and contained provisions to prevent anyone from putting a property on sale until they had a home information pack (HIP). Conveyancing lawyers have objected to HIPs on the basis that they will heap on costs for the seller who has to prepare the pack, as well as provide a valuable service only to prospective house-breakers and contribute little to defeating the problem of chains. So the Law Society went in, as Mr Ludlow puts it, ‘forcefully and openly’, engaging the media as well as lobbying and providing briefings.


It was an approach that, unsurprisingly, did not win them the gratitude of Lord Rooker, the housing minister. He was disappointed that ‘the “Lie Society” that masquerades as the Law Society’ claimed that HIPs could be exploited by burglars. ‘I don’t know why the Law Society perpetuates in telling untruths about what is in this Bill,’ he told Parliament. The attack had echoes of the government’s ill-tempered response to the Law Society’s ‘Justice Denied’ campaign in 1999 against the Access to Justice Bill. This comprised full-page advertisements in the national press featuring ‘victims’ of the government’s legal aid cuts. On that occasion, the Lord Chancellor of the time, Lord Irvine, accused Chancery Lane of ‘propagating untruths’.


In the recent spat, Lord Rooker retracted his earlier comments after being challenged by barrister-peer Lord Donaldson of Lymington and solicitor-peer Lord Philips of Sudbury. Even though the government used its Commons majority to force through compulsory packs, the Lords won important concessions such as a compulsory pilot scheme inspired by the contribution of solicitors.


The Law Society has learnt from the experience of the ‘Justice Denied’ campaign which, Mr Ludlow says, was ‘if not over-the-top, could have been more measured’. He explains: ‘We now argue from a broader consumer point of view that has become more subtle over time and we look for more partners.’ He points to the Law Society’s success in influencing the Mental Capacity Bill. Solicitors have pressed for law reform for many years and played an influential part in the Mental Health Alliance, a coalition of over 60 organisations.


Of course, lawyers are always open to accusations of being self-serving, reflects Mr Ludlow. ‘There is a disadvantage of being seen to represent a middle-class profession and, frankly, it doesn’t take much for government to fall back on [accusing us] of being “rich, BMW-driving lawyers”,’ he says. ‘So being a lawyer can be a double-edged sword.’



Jon Robins is a freelance journalist