Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

I support the principle laid out in Amendment 78, which is in this group, because appeals will almost always involve points of law. However, I urge the Government to think further about the kind of legal advice that is essential to immigrants and asylum applicants at a much earlier stage in the process. They cannot be expected to know when they leave their country of origin everything that is contained within the 1951 UN Refugee Convention, nor can they be expected to know the highly complex law that we now have in this country, much of which is expressed in statutes which refer to earlier statutes. Therefore, I ask the Government to think deeply, as the previous Administration began to do when they set up the Solihull pilot project, about providing legal advice to asylum seekers at a very early stage before even they have had their principal interview. That project has been going on for more than one year. I hope that it will very soon be possible to draw practical conclusions from it which can be extended to the whole country. Legal advice for these people does not necessarily have to be given by fully qualified solicitors or barristers who know or can be expected to look up the whole range of English law; it needs to be given by persons who understand the current content of immigration or asylum law.