Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

The Bill falls into two distinct parts, despite its tripartite title: first the reforms to sentencing and the punishment of offenders, and secondly the changes to legal aid. On the first part, I welcome the key changes. The public need reassurance that this Government can protect them from crime and tackle the issue of reoffending, about which my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Stephen Phillips) spoke so well. I particularly welcome the work for prisoners' reform. Locking up offenders is fine, but how much better to have them repaying their debt by working, and increasing their own motivation for and appetite for work on exit. Part of that must be the crackdown on drug abuse inside prisons. I completely agreed with my hon. Friend the Member for Broxtowe (Anna Soubry) when she pointed out how many people recently have expressed their concern and outrage at the concept of drug-free wings in prison. Our ultimate aspiration must be drug-free prison. That, above all, will help people avoid offending. I welcome this tough but fair Bill, which addresses the problems of drugs and worklessness in that respect. Turning to the legal aid side and the cuts in the civil sector, the Government have provided much evidence of the disproportionate costs of legal aid in this country, and I do not doubt it. I agree heartily with the strategy of discouraging too much litigation, particularly at a cost to the public purse. But surely the challenge that we are setting ourselves is to fillet out areas of waste while leaving intact the essential service of legal aid for the most vulnerable. I wonder whether the cuts as currently set out fall too harshly in an area that has as its sole objective the support for people who are least able to speak up for themselves. As the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull East (Karl Turner) said, that area is not replete with fat cat lawyers; it is mostly populated by men and women who are committed to helping the most needy in their communities. [Hon. Members: ““Hear, hear.””] As we know, not everyone is able to speak up for themselves. We talk of telephone lines and of self-representations at tribunals, which are things that MPs could do, although naturally we hope not to be in that situation, but which many people who are less educated simply cannot. I therefore ask the Government to consider carefully the issue of taking welfare benefits out of scope. That phrase needs some explanation; when talking to colleagues I have found that not everyone understands it. What it means is professional advice going to people who need it, regarding their welfare claims on the ground. It sounds trivial but it is absolutely not. This is about critical sums of money for families who need every penny—and, by the way, most of these situations do not involve a lawyer. In Hastings, three agencies have come together. They have a contract for £270,000, and last year they gave face-to-face service to 1,500 people—detailed advice and support, often including accompanying them to tribunals. Make no mistake: we need those services. I am told that 56% of those who attended that service had long-term illness or disability, and of those 69% had mental health issues. Where will they go? I hope we shall have an answer, because although we have had some encouraging comments from Ministers we need reassurance that there is somewhere for those people to go if that service is taken away. Last year, the Hastings advice and representation centre supported 250 benefits appeals, of which it lost only two, which clearly demonstrates the value of that work and the fact that it takes things on only where there is a real case to answer. If we knew that the Department for Work and Pensions made only good decisions and that the reforms to universal credit which we are so looking forward to had come through and the system worked 100%, I would have no doubts about supporting the cuts to that aspect of legal aid, but at the moment we know that is not the case, and while that problem exists we must have a system to support these people. I am not saying that there are no cuts to be made—oh no. We have a major deficit to sort out and we must make these cuts. The Law Society has made some suggestions; I have another. I would like to look very carefully at the funding of trivial human rights cases, in which lawyers have spent huge sums on establishing largely technical violations of the European convention. For instance, how much money was spent last year by the last Government on legal aid for prisoners? Can we have less legal aid for prisoners and more for the most vulnerable in our society?