Andrew Phillips, Lord Phillips of Sudbury, who has died aged 84, was a champion of “law for every man and woman”. As a pre-eminent charity solicitor, broadcaster and parliamentarian, he founded pioneering organisations dedicated to the widening of access to the justice system for the ordinary citizen, and energetically promoted individual rights, the civic life of small communities and a culture of charitable enterprise.
He also expanded access to the law through BBC Radio 2’s popular Jimmy Young Show. Starting in 1979, he was a weekly feature for 22 years as its “legal eagle”, dispensing practical legal advice to more than 2 million listeners. He also wrote a monthly law column for Good Housekeeping.
From the start of his career Phillips was troubled by the inadequacy of the legal aid system. Having set up a commercial law practice that stated “We do not seek to maximise profits … We seek to serve the public interest as well as our own”, in 1971 he, with three fellow solicitors, established the Legal Action Group, to encourage a more active approach to the delivery of legal information and services. This was the institutional beginning of the social-legal movement among socially aware lawyers.
Inspired by his experience as an early volunteer for Chad Varah’s Samaritans charity in the 1960s, Phillips developed a specialist practice in charity law. He was adept at persuading a prohibitively hidebound Charity Commission to grant charitable status to social enterprises that combined commercial activity with a public benefit. Early successes, after years of persistent advocacy, included the Charity Bank, the Fair Trade Association (now Fairtrade Foundation) and the Village Stores Association, as well as the London Lesbian and Gay Switchboard.
Further initiatives followed. In 1985 he secured funding from the Law Society and the support of the National Curriculum Council to set up the Law in Education Project, to inform young people of their legal rights and responsibilities and how the justice system should work. This led to the establishment of the Citizenship Foundation in 1989 (Young Citizens since 2018).
In 1996 he founded the Solicitors Pro Bono Group (now Law Works), a charity for connecting volunteer lawyers to people with low incomes who were ineligible for legal aid, as well as to not-for-profit organisations acting on their behalf. He was president until his death of both organisations, which flourish today.
Born in Long Melford, Suffolk, to Alan Phillips, a solicitor, and Dorothy (nee Wyndham), at the age of 10 Andrew was given the title of “office-boy auxiliary”, delivering letters around the country town of Sudbury in Suffolk for his father’s law firm, Bates Wells & Braithwaite. The family lived in a flat above the law office, and his father’s quotidian work as adviser and problem fixer for everyday people was an enduring influence on the boy’s view of the proper role of the legal profession.
A traditional upper-middle-class education boarding at Uppingham school, Rutland, (which, despite flourishing there, he despised) and Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he read economics and law, was followed by six years as a qualified solicitor, before Phillips founded his own central London commercial law firm in 1970. He called it Bates Wells and Braithwaite in a tribute to his father, although it was an entirely different entity. Its ethos, however, was the same.
The flip side of Phillips’s commitment to a socially responsible legal profession was his frequent and punchily expressed dismay at the commercialisation of the profession. On public platforms he inveighed against a legal system that increasingly served the wealthy and powerful: the City law firms, indulging in “licensed greed and corruption”, were engaged in a “macho money lust” for profits and salaries. Ordinary citizens, beleaguered by the accelerating concentrations of financial and political power, were increasingly disillusioned by the resulting distortions of the democratic process and became prey to populist parties. The only practical antidote was the development of the voluntary sector and local self-government, and popular participation in both.
Phillips’s faith in the local community as the fount of civic virtue and good government bordered on the romantic. But he put his beliefs into personal action by immersing himself in the civic life of Sudbury, where he settled, advising and chairing numerous local organisations as well as forming new ones. He was also an actively involved chancellor of the nearby University of Essex.
In 1998 Phillips accepted a life peerage and sat as a Liberal Democrat. He had begun his political life as a Gaitskellite Labour candidate in the 1970 general election, but shortly after switched to the Liberals, for whom he unsuccessfully stood in four elections. For someone committed to individual rights, community politics and devolved administration the Liberals were his natural party. But it also explained why, to the dismay of his many Liberal colleagues and friends, he supported Brexit, on the grounds that EU institutions lacked effective accountability and were too distant from the ordinary citizen.
Phillips dealt with a similar ambivalence about the undemocratic basis of the Lords by retiring from his firm and dedicating himself as a hard-working peer. Notable contributions included his leadership of the Lib Dems’ response to the Charities Act of 2006 (he tabled 200 amendments) and his opposition to the bill that led to the passing of David Blunkett’s Identity Cards Act 2006, only for it to be repealed by the coalition government in 2011.
Exhausted by the work, but without a procedural means of resigning, he took leave of absence in 2006, but returned to the colours in 2010 when the Lib Dems joined the coalition government. In 2015 he resigned, this now being permitted by the 2014 House of Lords Reform Act, which he helped design.
Naturally gregarious, with a tiggerish affability, Phillips was a formidable networker and persuasive advocate, whose energy, charged by a moral passion, wore down most sceptics. His primary legacy is an English legal profession that, despite its unremitting international commercialisation, is better equipped 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 teacher, whom he married in 1968, two daughters, Caitlin and Alice, and a son, Oliver.
• Andrew Wyndham Phillips, Lord Phillips of Sudbury, solicitor, born 15 March 1939; died 9 April 2023
