Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

My Lords, I declare an interest as president and founder of the Citizenship Foundation, which is the principal educator about the law in schools in this country. We work with more than half of all primary and secondary schools and try to give young people a sense of what it is to be a citizen of the modern, highly complex state. I commend the noble Lord, Lord Bach, for bringing forward this amendment and, indeed, I commend the Minister and the Government for an imaginative clause. I do not think that a clause such as this has appeared in legislation before, and I wholly commend it. I have only a couple of points to add to what the noble Lord, Lord Bach, said in moving his amendment. The first is that we still live in a system where ignorantia legis neminem excusat, which is all very well if you know Latin and if you know a bit of law, but the average man or woman in the street, let alone the average pupil in any of our schools, is understandably, predictably, woefully ignorant of this extraordinarily complicated society and state that we have given birth to, principally, I have to say, in these Houses of Parliament. I have mentioned before, and I have to mention again in relation to this amendment and this clause, that we have a larger corpus of statute law than any democracy in the world by far and, of course, we are supposed to be a common law system, so it is not as if it stands on its own. I believe that one of the principal causes of civic disaffection, if I can call it that, in this country, which I think is present and apparent on all sides—and I do not refer just to the riots a few months ago, I refer also to the declining turnout at elections and the declining inclination of people to stand for office in local government and so on—has everything to do with how people, not even consciously, feel that somehow we carry on here in total disregard of them out there. They never get asked, and they never get told, unless there is an election on, when all candidates are deeply keen to engage with the public at large. We have to do something about this. I am delighted to see that this clause is here. I shall be interested to hear what the Minister and other noble Lords say, but I would have thought that the importance of doing something about this is so pressing and so little understood that to have a requirement here rather than a discretion would, on balance, be desirable because there is no time to lose. I shall give one small example of what a desert there is of accessible information about the law. It is that the Citizenship Foundation publishes the Young Citizen’s Passport, which is a passport to the law that will affect young citizens when they leave the school gates or, indeed, before they leave them, to do with housing, sex, contract and so on. The Citizenship Foundation has sold 2 million copies of this booklet, and that is not a small number. I suggest that that gives an indication of what a thirst there is for accessible, practical information about issues of law that are not voluntary for anybody, but are compulsory for everybody. I wholeheartedly support this amendment.