The House of Lords debate which took place on 30 January revealed divided opinion on key issues in the proposed legislation in Part 2 of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill.

We now know the changes will be delayed. And emphasis was placed on the fact that the reforms are not actually ‘pure Jackson’ but only embody selected parts of Lord Justice Jackson’s report. For example, consider the replacement of after-the-event legal expenses insurance by ‘qualified one-way costs shifting’ (QOCS).

Liberal Democrat Lord Thomas of Gresford made a damning attack on exclusion of QOCS from the bill in favour of its introduction via the Civil Procedure Rules. He said ‘...The Civil Procedure Rules will come out of the air from somewhere and will not have any proper parliamentary scrutiny. They will have been drawn up as a result of discussion between the Executive and the Civil Procedure Rule Committee, which is entirely made up of judges and lawyers. I would have thought that there would be a constitutional position. It is more serious than anything else in the bill.’

Crossbench peer Baroness Butler-Sloss agreed, saying: ‘Perhaps the minister will not mind if I add a very few words. I had not intended to intervene but, as a former chairman of a rules committee, I have to say that I have considerable faith in the good sense of the way in which it does its work. But the points that have been made are extremely relevant. It is not really the business of a rules committee to change something so dramatic.’

Lord Beecham pointedly said to Lord Wallace of Tankerness, who was representing the government: ‘Perhaps, as he develops his reply, he would deal with the point of restricting this significant change to personal injury cases when Lord Justice Jackson advocated it across the piece.’ This raises clear professional conduct issues for the lawyer members of the Civil Procedure Rule Committee. If the Ministry of Justice provides notice under the Civil Procedure Act 1997 that rules be put in place, then the committee is required to do so. On the other hand, if there is a risk that it is being asked to breach constitutional law by exceeding its legal powers, then it has an impossible conflict of interest. Clearly there is little likelihood that any civil procedure rules will be drafted until this issue has been decisively resolved.

The Civil Justice Council confirmed to me by email on 31 January: ‘The Council was asked by the Ministry to come up with practical proposals on implementing QOCS (Part 36 and Proportionality). A working party was set up chaired by Alistair Kinley to look at these issues. The subsequent report was handed over to the Department in October; a workshop was convened to discuss the report attended by Departmental officials. The Council has had not been asked to carry out any further work since then’.

Lord Prescott meanwhile, the former deputy prime minister, focused on the role and impact of the press and media in bringing about the reforms. He said: ‘A survey has just come out - I do not know whether members have seen it - of 16 press organisations. It was conducted by the MoJ. Question one was: "Do you agree that CFA success fees should not longer be recoverable from the losing party in any case?".

'The answer was: "Yes, for the reasons set out in the response enclosed. UK law also needs to be amended to comply with Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights" - and that is quite apart from being shattered from our people claiming the human rights when they are spending most of the time trying to defeat it. But the point is that there are 16 identical replies - every one of the replies from television, radio, the Guardian, the Mail, Sky, BBC, was exactly the same, to all 60 questions. All of a sudden, when they are usually divided about many issues, when it comes down to money, all 60 answers are that they should keep their position. Even the good old liberal Guardian sided with Dacre, for God's sake - that takes a bit of thinking about.

'They are now agreed that they should be able to keep more of their money, even though they are the ones that transgressed in this situation.

‘For those 16 to get together-some lawyer has written the answer to every one of them. If a trade union did that, we would be in trouble. It would be all over the front pages: "60 identical replies, it must be a conspiracy". Of course it is a damn conspiracy. That they have come together in this survey to give exactly the same answers is perhaps not a crime, but it is near to it. They have the power for to do it.’

He went on to say: ‘Believe me, this press is not going to go away; it is still going to be committing the same offences. We have a Press Complaints Commission that is particularly useless and will continue to be unless we make fundamental changes. Anyone listening to the Leveson inquiry must hear that the press has not changed its mind; it is still going to go ahead and do the same things because that is how it sells newspapers.'

In what seemed to be a significant Conservative ‘about-turn’ Lord McNally replied: ‘We have to await the outcome of the Leveson inquiry.’

Alluding to the encouragement of ‘professional rogues’, Lord Bach observed: ‘It is only common sense that we should not seek to legislate for a system of litigation that allows professional people to prey on their impecunious and weak clients. The Committee today is full of professional people of one sort or another and the House is even more full of them when it is sitting.

‘As we all know, being in a profession is a privilege. When a professional takes on contractual fiduciary and moral duties to do their best to help their clients, they take on an important responsibility. We have professions in our society because we need experts who specialise, whether it is expertise in finance, in my example, the law, engineering or medicine.

‘They should know that society takes seriously if and when they act negligently, with malice, or breach their duty of care. Should we make it so difficult for the individual to take action and claim back their damages in full? Would that not have a corrosive impact on trust in the professions and their regulation, which is something that professions and the professionals themselves should not and do not welcome.

‘We think that the answer to this dilemma is to listen to what Lord Justice Jackson said and extend one-way costs shifting to all litigation, not just keep it to personal injury.’

He continued: ‘Should we fail to do this, and leave the bill unamended, the perpetrators of the Payment Protection Insurance mis-selling scandal - the mortgage mis-selling scandal of the 1980s and 1990s which noble Lords will remember - and thousands of other instances when rogue professionals have abused their position of trust, will go unpunished and unheard.

‘Their victims will multiply in a system where those who have been wronged are dissuaded from taking action against rogues, knowing that parliament will have legislated to substantially limit their rights to redress. It would be something of a rogues' charter.

‘I end what I have to say about this amendment by citing the views of the president of the Professional Negligence Lawyers Association, who said that many litigants face the dilemma of having had their trust betrayed by one professional adviser and that their only redress by way of litigation is to risk remaining assets and perhaps insolvency by trusting another - meaning another professional adviser - to win their case. That is not a satisfactory position and we ask the government to think again.’

The government has already conceded that personal injury claims including claims against medical professionals will have the benefit of qualified one way costs shifting. However, the justification to sweep away recoverable success fees and ATE premiums from every other category of civil litigation without even providing ‘qualified one way costs shifting’ in their place is becoming harder and harder to understand.

The legal aid cuts in Part I were all justified by the government’s need to cut the costs to the tax payer. The inability of the Conservatives to justify Part 2 (as seen above there is a clear difference in the Liberal Democrat position in the Lords) by reference to any savings to the taxpayer leaves open to speculation the question of they wish to bring about these reforms at all.

Lord Prescott is the only one who seems to have an explanation. If he is right, then these reforms are being implemented for reasons of political expediency for which ordinary people - like us - are expected to sacrifice our ability to enforce our civil rights. It is perhaps mischievous to suggest that if the Conservatives would go this far - would they go one step further and reintroduce slavery?

Katy Manley, is president of the Professional Negligence Lawyers Association