Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

The Minister has not really answered the point made by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mayhew, about cost savings. If there are 95,000 cases to be considered, what is the administrative cost? What is the cost in court time? It is not that you are considering only the 1.5 per cent of cases that are refused; you have to consider the whole 95,000 cases. The Minister will know that there was a time when the legal aid authorities decided that everyone should have legal aid regardless of their means and so on because the cost of administering the scheme as it then was far exceeded the savings on the very small number of people who did not qualify. We are in exactly the same position. These youth rehabilitation orders will be imposed in a criminal court—it is not a family court, it is not a social agency—and the role of the lawyer comes in at the very beginning. We do not have plea bargaining in this country but we certainly have bargaining about charges—to what charges will the defendant plead guilty; what charges will the prosecution drop? An enormous saving in time and administration is made by bargaining of that kind. Then if there are pleas of guilty properly advised by a lawyer, the lawyer is then concerned with marshalling all those matters which are necessary for the court to come to a proper conclusion as to which restrictions and requirements would be necessary, in this case in the youth rehabilitation order that is being considered. Lawyers are mechanics who help the whole system to work much more smoothly and much better than it otherwise would do. If you put into court unrepresented defendants it is bound, as the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, has pointed out, to slow the whole system down. The savings of £800,000 pounds are really—