Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

My Lords, one could be in danger of being slightly sentimental about the Access to Justice Act. Some in this Chamber will remember it very well and opposed it very strongly. I called it the ““Exit from Justice Act””. However, I recognise that legal aid is a sort of Cinderella of the welfare state and is a very difficult service to defend in terms of public opinion, for reasons that I advanced at Second Reading and which I do not propose to repeat. However, I will just say that I am, always have been and always will be, passionately committed to the legal aid scheme. Without an effective legal aid scheme the legislation we produce in this place can be viewed as cynical. To legislate rights knowing that a large number of those for whom they are intended do not have access to them must be a form of cynicism. Having said which, the Government are placed in an extremely difficult position, and there is no jibbing the fact that all departments of state have to bear some part of the cuts which the Government have determined are essential for our economic well-being. I am one who concurs with that judgment. I will say this only: I am anxious about the way in which the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, has drafted his amendment. I think it was in the 1970s that I first instructed the noble Lord, when he was a junior at the Bar. He will know from times past that I have always valued his advice since, and my firm continues to do so. However, on this one I am not at all sure that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith, has not touched upon a flaw, and a rather serious one, in this qualification that the Lord Chancellor has to secure these services, "““within the resources made available””." That seems to let any Government completely off the hook. If they make fewer resources available, that is it—finito. In fact, this is a rather dangerous amendment because, with that qualification in it, it seems to weaken perilously the clear obligation that would otherwise exist under the Bill to meet at least those services that are in the schedule, which by the end of this process we will have preserved. To put it more plainly, if these scheduled legal aid services which are in future to receive the aid of the state are made subject to the availability of resources, they cease to be absolute entitlements. I am extremely anxious about this formulation and would not personally support it.