Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

I beg to move, That the Bill be now read the Third time. At the conclusion of many hours of copious debate on the Floor of the House and in Committee, I pay tribute to members of the Bill team from my Department, who have been working throughout on this marathon Bill, and to my two colleagues, the Under-Secretary of State for Justice, my hon. Friend the Member for Huntingdon (Mr Djanogly) and the Under-Secretary of State for Justice, my hon. Friend the Member for Reigate (Mr Blunt) who, I am glad to say, carried the burden of the day in Committee and most of it on Report as well. I am grateful to them all. It is an enormous Bill representing a major reform of the criminal justice system and the justice system generally. It is overdue and the Government have made a good start on sorting out some of the problems facing the justice system. I shall mention briefly the legal aid reforms, which have been debated again today. They are extremely important. They make substantial savings and I acknowledge that we have had to make some difficult choices. I am a lawyer and I have many friends who are practising lawyers. When I was given this post, I wondered whether I would retain any friends in the legal profession by the time we got to Christmas. I am glad to say that I have, but some difficult decisions have been taken at the expense of some members of the profession, who have already suffered reductions in their fees as a result of the previous Government's changes, and have probably had a bigger reduction in their fee income, I concede, than almost any other group in the country. So let us acknowledge that there are people facing consequences as a result of what we have done, but it was much overdue. We have, as we keep saying, the most expensive legal aid system in the world. It has gone far beyond what could be afforded. The previous Government made repeated attempts to reform it and kept consulting on reforms and making changes. Even then they found, by the end of their period of office, that real-terms spending on legal aid had gone up quite substantially, compared with when they took office. What we have done is not just a cheese-paring exercise across the whole field of legal aid. We have gone back to first principles and asked what is essential that the taxpayer pays for to assure access to justice on truly important matters for that section of society that must have access to justice in the public interest, so that we can all be assured that people get the protections that they are entitled to under our constitution. That is what we have debated, one by one. I believe that the package that we have come up with will make substantial savings. As I was saying to the hon. Member for Hammersmith (Mr Slaughter) a few moments ago, the idea that we are launching some assault on access to justice and depriving people of access to justice is nonsense. We are not affecting the right. There is no change in the Bill to any particular course of action. Legal aid is available, but it is available to the poorest people for those really essential matters that affect their life, liberty, home and so on, and we have got it back under control.