Lords amend LASPO

Peers have passed amendments to the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill to protect sufferers of industrial diseases.

Lord Alton’s amendment ensures success fees and after-the-event insurance premiums continue to be recoverable in cases involving respiratory diseases. Lord Bach’s amendment applies the same to employers’ liability cases involving industrial diseases.

However, the government inflicted defeat on attempts to keep legal aid for immigration and debt cases. The Bill, as currently drafted, removes legal aid from all immigration cases apart from asylum, and from debt advice.

Deborah Evans, chief executive of the Association of Personal Injury Lawyers, welcomed the exemption for victims of industrial disease.

“It is still, however, a devastating blow for justice that the same degree of consideration was not given to the proposals for other innocent victims of injury, whose lives may also have been shattered through no fault of their own,” she says.