Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

My Lords, I wonder whether others felt, as I did, that what the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, just said was music to the ears. Of the amendments currently tabled to this Bill, I regard this amendment as by far and away the most important, and it is one that I strongly support. It provides the litmus test of what the Government are really trying to achieve with legal aid. This part of the Bill has been presented to us as a cost-saving measure that, in today’s climate, is hard to oppose, but as it stands it is far more than that. As others have said, Schedule 5 to the Bill repeals the fundamental principles of legal aid, which appear at present in the Access to Justice Act 1999. By removing them under Schedule 5, the Government have removed their obligation to supply legal services, to make sure that they are available and to make sure that the means of accessing them are available to those in need. They are, in effect, casting away two of the most vital parts of our constitution and essential ingredients of a just society. They are, first, equality before the law and, secondly, the principle that no one should be denied access to justice through lack of means. The omission of an overarching statement of principle at the start of this Bill signals that the Government no longer wish to honour that obligation. If the obligation does not rest on the Government, it does not in reality rest, or exist, at all. The Minister, the noble Lord, Lord McNally, is a highly experienced politician. For many years, he was a distinguished Labour Member of Parliament. Then he was a much respected Social Democrat. Now he is, of course, a Liberal member of the Conservative coalition Government. It is inconceivable that the Government’s obligations have been omitted from this Bill by accident or by his inadvertence. The core values that he embraced as a Labour MP, a Liberal Democrat and a liberal are surely those that are embraced by the two basic principles that I have just outlined. There is no reason to suspect that the noble Lord has changed his personal views or has abandoned that liberalism, except for one thing. It is a remarkable coincidence that many, but not quite all—I cannot resist this—Home Office Ministers in recent years underwent an extraordinary change in their attitudes on assuming office. Indeed, some say that there is a small room in the Home Office to which new Ministers are taken and where, probably at dead of night, a small chip is inserted in the back of the neck, after which, for the duration of their time in office, they become automatons doing the bidding of Home Office officials and the Treasury, and abandoning all shred of earlier stated principles of liberty and justice. Whether the noble Lord, Lord McNally, has been on the receiving end of this treatment is something that we will shortly discover, but I very much hope that he has not. I hope that in his dealings with this Bill, the noble Lord will stand by those principles, which I believe he held earlier and which his party claims to hold to this day. If he cannot accept this amendment today, at the very least I hope that he will go back to his department and to those who are less liberally minded in his office and put his foot down. If he does not, our constitution is in danger, under his watch, of changing very much for the worse as a result of this Bill.