Public Bodies Bill [HL]

My Lords, until about an hour ago I had intended and expected to wind up this speech by claiming a concession from the Government as a reward for good behaviour. Unfortunately, we have just had the debate and vote on the YJB, so my chances of any kind of reward for good behaviour have gone up in smoke. Nevertheless, I hope for a reasonable and positive response from my noble friend. It is clear to me that the House is fed up to the back teeth with this Bill and would like to see the back of it. Everybody wants to make progress and I will try to fit my speech to that. It is four months since we last debated the Administrative Justice and Tribunals Council and probably five months since we started to talk about this wretched Bill, so I understand the desire to get on. Four months ago, we debated the inclusion of the Administrative Justice and Tribunals Council in Schedule 1. An amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Borrie, to take it out of the schedule was defeated. I know that I cannot reopen that debate and I am not seeking to; rather, I am looking through these amendments, which I hope people will have realised are designed to add the justice councils to Schedule 2 and other schedules, to give the Government other options. I hope that the Government will feel that that is a reasonable add-on. It does not detract from the fact that the AJTC remains in Schedule 1, so that, if the Government want to bring forward an order to abolish it, they are quite at liberty to do so—my amendments would not prevent it. I hope that my mentioning the Civil Justice Council, which was originally included in Schedule 7, has not upset the judges, but I am slightly disturbed by the fact that all the judges on the Cross Benches appear to have fled since the earlier debate. I emphasise that my intention is in no way to threaten the Civil Justice Council but to see whether we can make a more rational disposition of advice on justice matters across the board. In passing, I observe that my confidence in Ministers has been encouraged by some of the things that have happened since the earlier stage, when I was, frankly, most irritated by the clearly spurious and flimsy arguments that they were using or causing to be used. At least they are now admitting that, in effect, the primary motivation is to save money. The Secretary of State says in a letter, after various preliminaries, that any change of the kind that I am proposing in the Bill—and, as far as I can see, any other change—is, "““undesirable as it would mean that we would not make the savings from the AJTC’s abolition that we are planning for””." At least that is straightforward. I can understand it and even relate to it. I was for most of 10 years a Social Security Minister, including three years as Secretary of State. I know what it is like to have the Treasury breathing down your neck, demanding whatever it is that it demands; you know that you are going to have to do some unpleasant things. I recognise that, but what I cannot quite stomach is the notion that, as a country, we are now so impoverished that we cannot spend a little money in this field related to justice between the citizen and the state. Are we really now that poor? I also cannot accept the argument that everything that the council does could be done—this echoes earlier debates—just as well by the Ministry of Justice. I asked previously what would happen when people made representations about, for example, the effect on tribunals of proposals for legal aid made by the same Secretary of State. How would any part of the ministry take an objective view on that? That would all be part of department policy and the ministry would just have to straddle both horses. I do not accept that the ministry will be able to do some of the things done by the council or, indeed, by the former Council on Tribunals—I see my predecessor on that body, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Archer of Sandwell, in his place. For me, the main point is that, although the Ministry of Justice now takes what are labelled as administrative justice decisions, the responsibilities for those run right across government. For example, the AJTC is taking a big interest in getting things right first time—improving initial decision-making—which we would all like to see. That is something for every department in Whitehall. The MoJ does not have responsibility for ombudsmen, although, according to its latest pronouncements, it has ambitions to learn a bit more about the subject. The Cabinet Office has that responsibility, although it has not been every effective in that respect, as different government departments have had all sorts of different policies, to the extent that there have been competing ombudsmen in the same field. Even now, the DCLG has proposals in the Localism Bill about ombudsmen that have enflamed more or less the entire ombudsman world. Where does that leave the Ministry of Justice? Will it attack the DCLG? Has it had any influence on those proposals? I doubt it. I simply do not believe that the MoJ can do what it says on the tin. That links with my second point. Why preserve the Civil Justice Council, which I am in favour of, and the Family Justice Council, which I am also in favour of, but abandon the one council which is concerned with justice between the citizen and the state and which has a 50-year-plus track record of bringing about improvements in that area? Let us be clear: we are not talking here about great judicial reviews or developers seeking to get their plans past a planning refusal. We are talking about hundreds of thousands of social security claimants, people claiming disability benefits, people who are under compulsory orders going to mental health tribunals and a whole range of others. I have the figures here—I was going to cite them but I will not—and the figures, particularly for those who are on social security and disability benefits, are rising all the time, partly because of the economic problems that we have. Why is this the Cinderella? Given that we are talking about the interests of many of the least articulate and most vulnerable people in our society, this is totally in conflict with coalition rhetoric.