Today’s Gazette contains an impassioned (and self-interested) plea for a shakeup of legal services regulation from the chief executive of CILEX. ‘Can everything just go back to how it was?,’ wonders Jennifer Coupland. ‘Mazur has shown that change is possible.’
Possible, most certainly. Likely? Probably not.
The will to unpick the notoriously convoluted 2007 settlement has been conspicuous by its absence since Michael Gove was at the Ministry of Justice. Where’s the electoral dividend, in this era of Westminster permacrisis? Just four MPs bothered to turn up to the Commons justice committee last week to interrogate leaders of the LSB and SRA. After Axiom Ince, SSB, and now PM Law – where a staggering £40m has dematerialised – one might have expected our tribunes to find the time.
Coupland’s best bet is probably a Reform government in 2029. Whether CILEX will get what it wants from Nigel Farage & Co is another matter entirely.
Similar thoughts occur in relation to clinical negligence reform, the subject of today’s feature. Like the Legal Services Act, the soaring cost of clin neg to the NHS has given rise to periodic bouts of hand-wringing for the best part of two decades. Again, the political will to take decisive corrective action has been noticeably absent. Doctors, lawyers, and injured patients and their families are formidable lobbies to engage. Taking them on all at once, while the media reaches for the popcorn, is unlikely to win many votes.
Labour, for all its more urgent difficulties, has pledged to act following another salvo of crisis rhetoric from public spending watchdogs. But one has cause to be wary. The Department of Health and Social Care has warned that there will be no ‘quick fix’. Disappointingly, too, the department has rejected calls to publish a review undertaken by David Lock KC, commissioned as part of the NHS 10-Year Health Plan, investigating ways to reform the escalating costs of claims. Why?
The Public Accounts Committee has been promised a ‘case for change’, along with a ‘workplan’ with ‘key timetables’ this autumn. All of which sounds suspiciously elastic. Whether we will get root-and-branch reform any time soon (and in particular fixed recoverable costs for lower-value claims, a hangover from the last government) must still be doubted.
No comments yet