Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

My Lords, I shall intervene briefly. My remarks, such as they are—I hope they will not be long—apply also to quite a number of other amendments for which I shall not be able to stay, some of them in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Bach. At Second Reading, I indicated that I have a lot of sympathy with many of these concerns, not least those in the field of welfare, for exactly the reason that my noble friend Lord Thomas of Gresford has just outlined. At one and the same time, we are passing—or the Government are proposing that we should pass—significant changes in the welfare area affecting hundreds of thousands of people and we are seeking to reduce the scope for people to have legal aid or support of one kind or another in challenging some of the decisions that will then be made. I think I referred to it at Second Reading as a sort of pincer movement in that respect and I see no reason to change that judgment now. That leads me to make two or three points. First, we really need something that we have not had, which is a combined impact assessment of the effect of the various pieces of legislation on poor and vulnerable people. We have not had it. This is not joined-up government and it is very difficult to make a judgment about what we collectively as a Parliament are doing to these people in those circumstances. That is aggravated by what has been acknowledged in this debate, which is that the Government do not know—I do not know whether the Minister will accept these words—what the financial effects of these measures will be, although we all know that there will be effects in increasing costs for other departments. The Government say that they cannot quantify them but I do not think that they would deny that they will be there. If they cannot quantify them, but cannot deny that they will be there, the savings figures are potentially meaningless. Even within the Ministry of Justice, which I assume has costed the consequences, the extra costs of claimants, litigants and appellants defending themselves will almost inescapably drive up the costs of the Tribunals Service. Has that been measured? Is it taken into account in these savings figures? These are the questions to which we have to have answers. I do not want to see these amendments pressed to a Division tonight any more than I did the previous one, but they enable us to say that we need to know what we are doing before we can make a judgment in these matters. I cannot stay for too much longer for reasons which I hope the House will understand but there are all sorts of things that one could say. Mediation was referred to earlier as well as alternative forms of advice in one way or another. Again, we need to know just what the position is. I should make the point that mediation has absolutely nothing to do with social welfare. You cannot have mediation about whether you are entitled to a benefit or not. You either are or you are not, although I accept that mediation may have a part to play in some other areas about which we are concerned. In any event, we keep hearing talk about more cost-effective ways—I do not know the exact phrasing—of assistance, advice and so forth. But as has been said and as was illustrated in the debate on the CABs not much more than a week ago, most sources of advice are being squeezed either by this Bill—for example, the effect on law centres and other advisory services depending on pro bono work or legal aid work from lawyers—or by the squeeze on local authorities, which is putting the bite on CABs. We then hear talk about this, that or the other amount of money being available, but it is far from clear whether the Government know whether the availability of other forms of advice is going up or down and whether the measures will have any significant effect in either direction. We need to know more about all this before we can make a sensible judgment. I am very grateful to my noble friend for having raised this issue, even though I hope that he will not press it further tonight.