Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

I agree with the noble Lord and I shall say a little word about that before I sit down. Admirable work has been done in the First-tier Tribunal to make it as friendly as one can. However, it is impossible—and the Minister has heard this from around the Committee today—to square the circle in that those tribunals still fundamentally are ruling on matters defined and decided through laws, rules and guidance, which is sometimes pretty heavy, that often carry criminal sanctions if violated. It is quite clear when one looks at official statistics on the First-tier Tribunals that the Government are wrong when they say that tribunals can be accessed without advice. You are twice as likely to win an appeal if you have had some basic advice rather than no advice at all. The Minister's team has kindly provided information that allows us to quantify the increase in likelihood of winning an appeal if the appellant has been advised. This is to the First-tier tribunal. For some types of cases, such as employment support allowance, you are more than twice as likely to win. Given that it allows people to return to work, seeing thousands of cases that would have been won with advice is surely wrong headed.