Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

My Lords, before I say anything else, I should make one prefatory remark of apology to the House and the Minister. It will not surprise those who have observed me in recent times to learn that my stamina is not quite what it was. I hope it will be understood that I shall not feel able to stay for the winding-up speeches later on. I am sorry for not complying fully with the conventions of the House in that respect. If the Minister chooses to ignore me entirely, I shall of course understand completely. In the mean time, I shall try to refrain from asking him too many questions. In line with almost everybody else in this debate—I want to make this clear to my noble friends on the Front Bench—I am not opposed to this Bill in principle. It is important, and there is a lot of important stuff in it. I do not think that we should attempt to frustrate it. We have had as good a debate as I can recall on any such matter, and it has been a privilege, as a non-lawyer and layman in the field, to have the opportunity to take part in it. I should also tell my noble friends—this may be music to their ears—that wherever I can give the Government the benefit of the doubt they will have it. As for the sentencing and punishment—I must say that I prefer the word rehabilitation—of offenders chunk, if it is in line with the normal liberal instincts of my right honourable friend Kenneth Clarke, I shall be happy to go along with it. I am also pleased that my noble friend Lord McNally said that he was listening. If I am allowed to note it and it is in line with the rules of the House, I was particularly pleased to note that my right honourable friend Kenneth Clarke actually came along to listen this afternoon, which was a further encouragement. I want to concentrate on civil legal aid, or rather the proposed cuts in it. I am not now talking about the Jackson aspects, which I broadly support and which seem broadly sensible. Nevertheless, I hope that attention will be paid to the wise words of my noble friends Lord Hunt of Wirral and Lord Faulks and, indeed, to the words of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf, which seem to me to be very important in this context. The areas that concern me have already been highlighted, so I am not going to rehearse them. One is social welfare law, including the effects on disabled people, on people with special educational needs and learning disabilities, who are a subset of disabled people, and on the law centres that are associated with those effects on social welfare law. I am concerned about the effects on family law, and especially on battered people—battered wives, mainly—and children, which have been highlighted in a number of important speeches. I am concerned about the effect on clinical negligence, where I have some experience as a chair of a number of health trusts, and where I certainly share some of the concerns that were expressed by my noble friend Lord Faulks but not only by him. I also still remain a bit concerned about some of the effects in the area of immigration. We had a go at the Government about that a few weeks back in a dinner-hour debate, where I made it clear that I welcomed the concessions but thought that a few questions remained. As I have already said, I am not going to rehearse the arguments. Noble Lords on all sides of the House will have representations running out of their ears, and I have them running out of mine. The conclusion I draw is that there is now so much smoke on some of the issues that I have touched on that there must be some fire somewhere, and we need if possible to put it out. I shall mention three or four other points briefly. I have never seen such a strong feeling that a set of cuts will not produce the savings that they are said to produce. What we appear to have here, as I judge it—and I should warn the Minister that this is an area that we all need to explore very vigorously in Committee—is a set of cuts that will save the Ministry of Justice money at the cost of passing costs to a number of other departments, including the welfare departments, throughout Whitehall and beyond, including, perhaps, local authorities as well. Even within the Ministry of Justice, I suspect that we have proposals that are going to pass costs from one part of the ministry to another. I was the previous chairman of the Administrative Justice and Tribunals Council. It was notorious that, in many jurisdictions, cases where people turned up unrepresented took longer and cost more than cases where they had legal advice or assistance. Has that been costed? I am not sure. I happened to speak at the beginning of last week with a barrister who had been involved in a case involving a litigant in person. He sounded a sensible fellow, although I cannot validate this in any other way. He reckoned that this case—a High Court case, not one involving civil legal aid—had taken, in his estimation, two and a half weeks instead of four days because of the appearance of a litigant in person. If that was replicated on any scale at all, the savings in possible civil legal aid cases would disappear in a flash. We need to explore that. It was brought out very clearly by my noble friend Lord Pannick—I am going to call him my noble friend for this purpose. I accept the need to make savings, and I hope that that will not be thrown at me. However, the Government’s position, which I support, was to make these savings and fill the debt hole, or whatever we want to call it, with savings that would not be at the expense of the poorest and most vulnerable but might even help them. As I hear things at the moment, this Bill does not do what it said on that tin. Let me conclude with one very brief example. If I was not here, I would be upstairs in Committee on the Welfare Reform Bill. While discussing that Bill, we have heard about disabled people’s fears that a lot of them are going to lose out as a result of it. I am not saying that they will or will not, but that is their fear. A figure has been bandied around of 650,000 people who could lose out on disability living allowance as it moves on to something else. That group of people will include many who will want to challenge the results of a new system of that kind. Here we are, then, at one and the same time putting this fear into people’s minds, potentially cutting their benefits and reducing the scope for them to challenge what has been done to them. It is a sort of pincer movement. It is not the kind of thing I like, and I will need to be persuaded before I vote for it.