Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

My Lords, this Bill is another monster piece of legislation—234 pages long—amending no fewer than 34 other statutes and repealing parts of 20 statutes. I rather concur with the suggestion made by my noble friend Lord Goodhart that it might have been more manageable were we to have taken this in two bites. Certainly, the complexity of this measure will tax all of us to the limit and, I fear, the Minister beyond endurance. Having heard the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, mention the speech made by Sir Hartley Shawcross on 15 December 1948 in moving the Second Reading debate of the Legal Aid and Advice Bill, I cannot resist quoting the first two sentences, the first of which illustrates the gulf of style that separates then from now and the second of which is a rather pithy encapsulation of what the Labour Government were then trying to do. I wish that I could put on his accent, but he said: "““If I might translate a respected expression from the promissory and ephemeral field in which it has been misemployed of late into the sphere of intended enactment, I should be inclined to call this Bill a charter. It is the charter of the little man to the British courts of justice””.—[Official Report, Commons, 15/12/48; col. 1221.]" With that, we can all concur. Like the noble Lord, Lord Clinton-Davis, I have been a solicitor for more years than I dare to remember. But I came into the profession in the 1950s fired—I have to be frank—with a certain idealism that the 1949 Act had brought justice within the reach of every man and woman. I fear that I still persist in that ideal, although one has to confess that over the intervening years the legal aid scheme has run down and down. There is one reason above all for that—it is not a popular scheme with the great British public. It is if you take advantage of it but it is not in general. I am afraid it is assumed that anything that is good for the legal aid scheme is most of all good for lawyers and we are the least popular branch of the entire establishment. In my view that makes it more essential that we defend the legal aid scheme. I accept and want to make clear, especially to my noble friends on the Front Bench, that it must have been most difficult to put this measure together in a circumstance where all departments of state are having to take their share of unpopular and unwished for cuts, but which are, none the less, I believe, necessary. However, two broad matters, both of which have been referred to by other noble Lords in this excellent debate, have to be faced by the Government and have to be satisfied if this Bill is to go forward without doing far more damage than good. The first matter is simple, yet complex, and it has been referred to many times; that is, the boast in this country of equality before the law. Is it not something which enables us to sleep soundly that the judges are not corrupt and that the law is designed with the best of intentions? Again, if we are honest, we have to accept that year-by-year—it does not matter which Government are in power—we legislate more and more benefits for the disadvantaged, the poor, the unable and so on. It is a large slice of every party manifesto. Religiously and properly we legislate and enact those good intentions. But we all know full well that those rights are not enjoyed by a large minority of those for whom they are intended. There is no access to those benefits. Why? Above all, it is because the law relating to access is a jungle. If you think that only tax law is a complicated jungle, just have a look at welfare law. I believe that if we legislate rights and benefits for our less advantaged citizens, knowing that they will not be taken advantage of because we do not have the wherewithal to enable the people who need those benefits to access them, we are engaged in an organised hypocrisy. We undermine this place and democracy. We add to citizen disenchantment and to a social context which I believe is one we should all worry greatly about—a context which I suggest showed at least one aspect of itself in the riots a few months ago. I am apologetic to my noble friends on the Front Bench because I appreciate that they are in a position that I am not, but I cannot resist saying, as an old lawyer who has spent his life standing up for legal aid—I formed the Legal Action Group with others in 1971—that I cannot go along with a situation where we pretend that we are doing good to our fellow citizens when we know we are not and we know why we are not. Yet in this Bill we are doing exactly that. To take but one example, we are excluding welfare advice from legal aid henceforward. Can anyone imagine any aspect of our law which more needs help and advice than welfare law? I cannot. Citizens Advice has 400 main offices and 3,300 satellites. It deals with 2.1 million advices every year and welfare law problems are a major part of that. Yet that will be taken out of scope. Law relating to social security, debt, housing, immigration, community care and employment will be taken out of scope, although not totally. However, welfare will be. Citizens Advice calculates that at present the advice given in those areas by the CABs and the approximately 50 law centres that still exist, but which are declining, costs £25 million plus to the Exchequer. If this Bill is enacted as currently drafted, that sum will be down to £5.5 million. But as others have said, no serious attempt has been made to calculate the downstream impact in just financial terms, let alone in terms of pain, suffering, disenchantment and cynicism. Recently, the Ministry of Justice stated: "““The lack of a robust evidence base means we are unable to draw conclusions as to whether wider economic and social costs are likely to result from the programme of reform or to estimate their size””." What are we doing? We know the suffering, the disenchantment and the cynicism that will follow. We have made no attempt to calculate the financial costs in social or other terms. We know that these problems come in clusters and that if a man is not given advice on a housing problem because it is now out of scope, that may lead to an eviction order in a court, which in turn will lead to a plethora of social security and welfare engagements, such as children—you name it. Tens of thousands of pounds could be involved for the saving of a piece of advice by a CAB or a solicitor—God bless him if he is still doing this type of work. Let us not forget either that the cost of this work is by the standards of most solicitors puny. It is a £150 fixed fee for every case that they take on. A City solicitor charges £150 for 10 or 15 minutes of his precious time. I could go on but time is against me. I hope that when we get into the details of this Bill, we will be able fairly and squarely to face up to the on-the-ground realities so that we emerge with a Bill that does justice to the Government’s needs and aims but also does justice to justice.