Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, for his words. We are very pleased to see the noble Lord, Lord Bach, with us. He very courteously explained to me the personal reasons why he could not be with us earlier, but it is good to see him in his place now. The debate has taken on some of the aspects of a Second Reading debate and it is none the worse for that. The first amendment allows for such wide-ranging points to be made. I shall not try to reply to them all at this point, as we are at the very start of Committee stage. My noble and learned friend Lord Wallace and I will return to many of the issues, like medical negligence and social welfare, as the Committee stage runs forward. I accept the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Beecham, that the official Opposition are not arguing for retaining the status quo. He and the spokesman for the Labour Party in the other place have made it clear that, if they had been in office, faced with the economic situation with which we are faced, they too would have been making cuts. The debate is about where those cuts should be made and with what impact. It is fair for him to look at the impact assessment, and the fact that it lends some ammunition to him is an assurance that it is a very fair impact assessment. The very first question I answered from this Dispatch Box about the Bill related to the fact that if you make budget cuts to a section of government expenditure that is mainly focused on the needy, it is the needy who will find the impact of those cuts. That is true of housing, social welfare, and so on, and that is the reality of a Government who have to cut back on expenditure. I make no complaint at all about the contributions from lawyers in the debate. If we were debating a fundamental issue about medicine, I would hope that the noble Lord, Lord Winston, and other expert medics in the place would contribute; and if we were talking about defence, I would hope that our generals would contribute. I do not think that there is anything wrong with the fact that a large number of the contributors have come from the legal profession. The daunting thing for me, as a non-lawyer, is the array of talent that is on display from the legal profession. I always remind my colleagues down the corridor that, whenever I stand at this Dispatch Box, I am very conscious that somewhere in the listening audience there are about three former Lord Chancellors and half a dozen former Solicitor-Generals or Attorney-Generals. I have never quite got to grips with the number of QCs that we have in the House of Lords, but there is a goodly number. We have good legal expertise and this debate is, and the Committee stage will be, all the better for it. It is certainly not my intention to approach this—I am trying to find that barb from my noble friend—with something like tetchy impatience. In fact, over the past few months, I have been watching my noble friend Lord Howe at the Dispatch Box. He will be my model for this Committee stage—a kind of concerned bedside manner. However, in talking about Committee stage when I was on the Benches opposite, I was on record as saying that if the House divides in Committee, almost invariably one will have to resist. I genuinely want to use Committee stage to listen. I cannot make blanket promises and I certainly, at this stage, cannot start giving a list of concessions. The position of the Government is that the Bill has been delivered from the other place in pristine condition and ready for adoption but, as our system works, we listen to the advisory—