Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

If my hon. Friend will let me finish, I will allow her to intervene again later. The reference to ““any incident””, for example, might be read as securing legal aid for any person who could point to some sort of incident regardless of whether it was serious or minor, such that the victim would not generally feel inhibited about pursuing litigation against the other party. That would not reflect the underlying intention, nor would it be the effect in practice if the regulations required certain forms of proof. The touchstone for whether a party obtains funding must be whether the abuse was such as to inhibit their ability to present their case against the other party. The circumstances that will be accepted as evidence of the abuse will turn on the application by courts, prosecutors and other agencies of their existing criteria. It is when the courts and others have determined that the level of the abusive conduct is such that protective action or prosecution is necessary that legal aid will be available.