Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

I was going to deal with that at the end of my remarks, but let me do so now. I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for giving me the opportunity to do so, because two days ago the Minister said, ““Oh, the Labour party wants to reinstate £245 million of cuts.”” On the same day, however, he put out a press release saying that the Labour party wanted to reinstate £64 million of cuts, and I have grown tired of responding to him. He has heard my response from this Dispatch Box, in Westminster Hall and in Committee time and again, and it is simply this: we would not have made at present the cuts to social welfare legal aid. The Minister quantifies those cuts as £64 million, but why did he not proceed with the final parts of Lord Carter's review and go through the criminal tendering exercise, which was in place and ready to go when the Government took office last year, and which included savings that might have raised twice that sum? I anticipate the figures changing. The figures on savings have changed from £350 million to £450 million within two impact assessments, but, without being more precise than that, we believe that if the Government looked for efficiencies in the criminal legal aid system, first they would save more money than they are by cutting social welfare legal aid, and secondly there would not be the same social or financial consequences. The Green Paper talks frequently about the possibility of self-representation as a reason for withdrawing legal aid provision, but data provided in answer to a written parliamentary question indicate that there are considerable differences in success rates between those with and those without representation. Owing to a lack of representation, 51,223 meritorious cases that were successful in 2010 at the first-tier tribunals, many of which involved applicants for DLA, incapacity benefit, jobseeker's allowance and so forth, would not have been successful if the proposed cuts had been in place. The changes will close or severely reduce the operation of law centres, citizens advice bureaux and hundreds of independent advice centres, and limiting the scope of issues which legal aid-funded advisers can help with means that they will not be able to solve people's problems fully. New clause 17, in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for Makerfield addresses precisely that issue. At the end of Monday's debate, I gave the example of the Wiltshire law centre in the constituency of the hon. Member for South Swindon (Mr Buckland). That will lose 90% of its funding, and that is not untypical of the cuts being made. In most cases they are above 80%. The specific issue that is dealt with my hon. Friend's new clause is the interconnectivity of people's problems. We are all too familiar, as constituency MPs, with the individual who comes in with two plastic bags full of paper and is unable to convey the scale of their distress, let alone the complexity of their problems, which may include unpaid debts, threats of eviction, underlying mental health problems and the inability to access the welfare benefit system. Sometimes we can help, and I pay tribute, as I am sure all hon. Members do, to the constituency staff who have developed phenomenal skills at unpicking these issues and dealing sympathetically with them. In many cases, however, legal expert help is needed, but that help will now be severely compromised. If one is allowed to deal only with the threat of eviction but not with the underlying issues of accessing benefits and dependency on debt, one is working with one hand tied behind one's back. The exceptions to the withdrawal of legal aid in certain cases, such as when an applicant for legal aid is at risk of homelessness, are nonsensical distinctions. People who come for aid early on, while they still have manageable rent arrears, can see their case deteriorate rapidly and drastically. The legal aid that would help exactly those people has been withdrawn, and that is Shelter's No. 1 priority for what should be restored. Let me add, at this point, that we support the hon. Member for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr in his wish to undo what is a calumny in the Bill—measures allowing the Secretary of State by order further to restrict what is in scope for legal aid, but not to expand it. I do not know whether the hon. Gentleman is going to press his amendment to a vote tonight but I hope that, if he has an opportunity to speak, the Minister will give an indication that that glaring error in the Bill will be corrected. The cost of dealing with a single case of homelessness has been estimated at £50,000 by Shelter. Early intervention is an extremely efficient and cost-effective way of preventing cases from becoming more complex, difficult to resolve and commensurately expensive. The legal aid Green Paper suggests a shift to telephone advisory services, and this brings us to amendment 148. Although these methods are an efficient and often effective means of delivering certain types of advice, clients presenting with complex or chronic problems gain far better outcomes from face-to-face advice. Research by the Legal Action Group has highlighted the issues faced by the most vulnerable in utilising telephone advisory services. It found that full-time employees were the most likely to access an advice service through the telephone line or the internet, at 43%, whereas people in the lowest social class, DE, were least likely to access advice through an advice line or the internet, at 26%. This class of people was also the most likely to experience a social welfare law problem. The Minister's own impact assessment says that the bottom 20%, in terms of income, will represent 80% of those who suffer from the withdrawal of these services. Overall, people of social class DE are twice as likely as people in all other social classes to experience problems with debts or benefits. Issues facing the most vulnerable people include language, comprehension and somewhat more prosaic economic issues such as the expense of calling an 0845 number from a pay-as-you-go mobile when trying to get advice upon being rejected for jobseeker's allowance. Citizens Advice has noticed a dramatic rise in the volume of cases and the number of people seeking advice in this recession. Advice has been focused on debt, housing, employment and difficulty accessing the benefit system. For example, between April 2008 and 2009, CABs in England and Wales saw daily inquiries relating to redundancy increase by 125%. Local authority cuts combined with the cuts in the Ministry of Justice have inflicted a double whammy on law centres, CABs and third sector organisations. Many organisations that are staffed by a mixture of volunteers and modestly paid staff will be forced to close or reduce staff and service breadth, depth and reach. Indeed, that is already happening. We agree that the legal aid budget needs to be contained, as I have already said in response to the intervention of the Chair of the Justice Committee, the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Sir Alan Beith), and that ways of making savings need to be found. When we were in power we did not shy away from taking those decisions and containing the budget. We had begun and were continuing to implement the recommendations of Lord Carter of Coles and we believe that those outstanding recommendations should have been implemented by this Government. Frankly, we are at a loss to understand why the Government have not looked at the scope of criminal legal aid or at how it is delivered in this country, preferring instead to target the poorest and most vulnerable. I accept that those changes would not have been popular with all the legal sector but they would have delivered substantial savings, which would have been greater than the total cuts to social welfare legal aid we have discussed this week. Let me pay tribute to my colleague the noble Lord Bach who, as Minister with responsibility for legal aid, took exactly that line. He was prepared to be very tough on his own profession but he always protected social welfare legal aid. We oppose the cuts because they affect the most vulnerable in society and run the risk of decimating the social welfare and legal advice community. Even at this stage, I urge the Government to rethink their plans. If they will not, I shall ask again, and I am pleased to see that hon. Members from all parties, save the Conservative party, have tabled amendments on this matter for debate today. I hope—I say this in the spirit of wanting to protect those of our constituents who are most vulnerable and most reliant and who need access to justice more than ever today—that those amendments will be pressed to a vote by hon. Members, particularly those on the Liberal Democrat Benches, and that they will see fit to support our amendments when we push them forward.