Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

I shall follow your helpful steer, Mr Deputy Speaker, and make progress. I realise that these are important matters, but I could find myself giving way to everyone in the Chamber. Few of these are easy choices, but they often involve disputes about financial issues rather than life and liberty. It is sensible to give such things as financial disputes a lower relative priority. It is sensible, too, to address areas that the public consider unreasonable. For example, we are cutting out legal aid for squatting. Following representations from the Judges Council, we are ending legal aid for some repeat judicial reviews on immigration and asylum cases that have already had a hearing and where repeated review is being used only to obstruct and delay proceedings. Across some of these areas, reformed no win, no fee arrangements will be available, but our broader ambition is that people will be encouraged to use alternative, less adversarial means of resolving many of these important problems. For private family law cases, the Government are increasing spending on mediation and legal advice in support of mediation by two thirds, or £10 million, to a total of £25 million a year. Mediation has a high success rate––about 75%––in resolving most of the family disputes that go before it. We have made no blanket funding exclusions. The Bill establishes an exceptional funding scheme for exceptional cases, administered by a statutory office holder free of ministerial control. That will provide funding for an excluded case where in the particular circumstances the failure to provide support would be likely to result in breach of the individual's right to legal aid under the Human Rights Act 1998 or European law.