Lord Phillips of Sudbury obituary | Law
Andrew Phillips, Lord Phillips of Sudbury, who has died aged 84, was a winner of “law for each guy and woman”. As a pre-eminent charity solicitor, broadcaster and parliamentarian, he founded revolutionary organisations dedicated to the widening of access to the justice method for the ordinary citizen, and energetically promoted person legal rights, the civic everyday living of compact communities and a lifestyle of charitable organization.
He also expanded obtain to the regulation by means of BBC Radio 2’s well-liked Jimmy Youthful Clearly show. Starting off in 1979, he was a weekly feature for 22 yrs as its “legal eagle”, dispensing realistic legal assistance to additional than 2 million listeners. He also wrote a regular monthly legislation column for Very good Housekeeping.
From the start off of his vocation Phillips was troubled by the inadequacy of the lawful help technique. Owning set up a industrial legislation exercise that said “We do not seek to maximise gains … We seek out to provide the community fascination as effectively as our own”, in 1971 he, with 3 fellow solicitors, recognized the Authorized Motion Team, to persuade a additional active method to the supply of authorized information and expert services. This was the institutional starting of the social-lawful movement between socially knowledgeable lawyers.
Impressed by his practical experience as an early volunteer for Chad Varah’s Samaritans charity in the 1960s, Phillips created a expert observe in charity regulation. He was adept at persuading a prohibitively hidebound Charity Fee to grant charitable standing to social enterprises that put together commercial exercise with a general public gain. Early successes, after yrs of persistent advocacy, incorporated the Charity Lender, the Good Trade Affiliation (now Fairtrade Basis) and the Village Shops Association, as very well as the London Lesbian and Homosexual Switchboard.
Further more initiatives followed. In 1985 he secured funding from the Law Society and the assistance of the Countrywide Curriculum Council to set up the Legislation in Training Job, to advise young individuals of their legal rights and duties and how the justice process should really do the job. This led to the institution of the Citizenship Foundation in 1989 (Young Citizens given that 2018).
In 1996 he launched the Solicitors Professional Bono Group (now Legislation Is effective), a charity for connecting volunteer legal professionals to men and women with minimal incomes who were being ineligible for lawful help, as effectively as to not-for-revenue organisations performing on their behalf. He was president right until his death of both organisations, which flourish today.
Born in Lengthy Melford, Suffolk, to Alan Phillips, a solicitor, and Dorothy (nee Wyndham), at the age of 10 Andrew was presented the title of “office-boy auxiliary”, providing letters all-around the place town of Sudbury in Suffolk for his father’s law firm, Bates Wells & Braithwaite. The spouse and children lived in a flat earlier mentioned the regulation business, and his father’s quotidian perform as adviser and challenge fixer for each day people today was an enduring impact on the boy’s watch of the suitable function of the lawful profession.
A conventional upper-center-class schooling boarding at Uppingham university, Rutland, (which, despite flourishing there, he despised) and Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where by he read through economics and regulation, was followed by six years as a capable solicitor, ahead of Phillips established his possess central London industrial legislation agency in 1970. He identified as it Bates Wells and Braithwaite in a tribute to his father, though it was an completely distinctive entity. Its ethos, nevertheless, was the same.
The flip side of Phillips’s motivation to a socially responsible legal profession was his recurrent and punchily expressed dismay at the commercialisation of the profession. On general public platforms he inveighed versus a authorized program that more and more served the wealthy and strong: the City legislation firms, indulging in “licensed greed and corruption”, have been engaged in a “macho funds lust” for income and salaries. Regular citizens, beleaguered by the accelerating concentrations of fiscal and political power, have been significantly disillusioned by the resulting distortions of the democratic course of action and grew to become prey to populist events. The only practical antidote was the growth of the voluntary sector and area self-authorities, and well known participation in each.
Phillips’s religion in the community community as the fount of civic advantage and great federal government bordered on the passionate. But he put his beliefs into own action by immersing himself in the civic daily life of Sudbury, wherever he settled, advising and chairing numerous regional organisations as properly as forming new kinds. He was also an actively included chancellor of the nearby University of Essex.
In 1998 Phillips acknowledged a lifetime peerage and sat as a Liberal Democrat. He had started his political existence as a Gaitskellite Labour applicant in the 1970 general election, but shortly right after switched to the Liberals, for whom he unsuccessfully stood in four elections. For anyone dedicated to particular person rights, neighborhood politics and devolved administration the Liberals were being his natural bash. But it also stated why, to the dismay of his lots of Liberal colleagues and good friends, he supported Brexit, on the grounds that EU establishments lacked effective accountability and ended up much too distant from the common citizen.
Phillips dealt with a identical ambivalence about the undemocratic foundation of the Lords by retiring from his agency and dedicating himself as a tricky-doing the job peer. Noteworthy contributions integrated his management of the Lib Dems’ response to the Charities Act of 2006 (he tabled 200 amendments) and his opposition to the invoice that led to the passing of David Blunkett’s Identity Playing cards Act 2006, only for it to be repealed by the coalition govt in 2011.
Fatigued by the work, but with out a procedural indicates of resigning, he took go away of absence in 2006, but returned to the colors in 2010 when the Lib Dems joined the coalition govt. In 2015 he resigned, this now currently being permitted by the 2014 Dwelling of Lords Reform Act, which he assisted structure.
By natural means gregarious, with a tiggerish affability, Phillips was a formidable networker and persuasive advocate, whose electrical power, charged by a moral enthusiasm, wore down most sceptics. His most important legacy is an English legal profession that, even with its unremitting worldwide commercialisation, is much better outfitted and, in some quarters more willing, to serve the disadvantaged and charities than would otherwise have occurred.
Phillips is survived by his wife, Penelope (nee Bennett), an English instructor, whom he married in 1968, two daughters, Caitlin and Alice, and a son, Oliver.
