The rights of innocent victims have had shockingly little bearing on the shape of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill, which has been driven by a mythical compensation culture as part of a surreptitious government cost-cutting agenda. Sadly, those same victims appear to have been given equally scarce consideration by the Association of Personal Injury Lawyers in the so-called 'compromise' its executive is advocating.

It is easy to be defeatist in the face of the government’s shockingly ill-thought-through reforms. However, now is not the time to abandon our principles. It is difficult to see APIL’s desire to protect lawyers’ success fees, while abandoning after-the-event recoverability and qualified one-way costs shifting - the very parts of the bill which do offer injured victims protection - as anything but self-serving.

The House of Lords has given the bill a gratifying level of scrutiny over the past month, as we have seen in the Consumer Justice Alliance’s (CJA) own lobbying efforts. This can hardly lead to complacency, given the coalition’s apparently secure majority in the Commons, but over the coming weeks we need to ensure that telling arguments hit home.

It would be naive to expect the personal injury industry to avoid any kind of change. As has already been agreed across a wide spectrum, referral fees, data selling and third-party capture are all areas which warrant reform. There are even ways in which the government’s financial position - the real agenda they are not willing to volunteer - could be improved and the Consumer Justice Alliance has put ideas to the Ministry of Justice, without response.

Yet, what currently threatens the statute books is not merely an efficient streamlining of the system. Put simply, the bill bulldozes innocent victims’ rights, treating them on the one hand as a corporate entity which needs to have a financial ‘stake’ in any claim, while on the other regarding their hard-fought compensation as akin to a lottery windfall. We are all too aware that time is short. Nevertheless, we cannot abandon injured victims, who are the focus of the CJA. We must make parliament understand the truth behind these reforms: they are wrong in principle and unworkable in practice.

Nigel Muers-Raby, chairman, Consumer Justice Alliance