Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

My Lords, we come on now to an important element of Part 1 of the Bill, which is the mandatory gateway. Although I am sure the Committee knows this very well, I just remind noble Lords that if the relevant area of law is out of scope, there will be no point in ringing up the mandatory gateway, because the client will be told—no doubt very politely—that this is not in scope and that they will have to go elsewhere if they want legal advice. When we talk about the mandatory gateway, it is for the areas of law that remain in scope, such as parts of housing law, very small parts of debt, community care and parts of education. We are talking about a limited field. It is no answer to the areas of law that it is intended to take out of scope. I start by saying that my experience as a Minister was that the telephone advice centre is a fantastic channel for delivering advice. I am sure that the noble Lord and his colleague the Legal Aid Minister have, as I have, visited telephone advice centres and been impressed. I certainly was in my turn. It can be convenient for those with busy lives, allowing them to access services at their convenience, and it can be—although it is not always—a cheaper way to deliver advice than face to face through a bricks-and-mortar centre. We also have the community legal advice helpline, which is excellent. All of us, I am sure, would be glad to see the work of that organisation continue and expand. However, there is a ““but”” here, and it is a big ““but””. We on this side of the House do not think that the right way of dealing with the issue of getting advice lies in the Government’s plans to institute a mandatory telephone gateway. We will ask the Government exactly what they intend, but this would seem to mean that anyone seeking to use a service funded through the legal aid and advice scheme would have to first call a hotline that would then direct them to the right service. Our concerns are these. It is proposed to introduce the mandatory single telephone gateway first for matters of debt, although comparatively few debt matters are left if the Bill goes through in its present form; for special educational needs—that part of education law that the Government have had second thoughts about and that is still now in scope; for discrimination—the only part of employment law that remains; and for community care cases, which, again, the Government quite rightly had second thoughts about. The Government have stated their intention to roll it out to other areas of law as soon as practicable. It is hard to find much mention of the mandatory gateway in the Bill. You have to look pretty hard, but in Clause 26 the Committee will see that there is mention of various ways in which advice can be given. It is otherwise something that we know about because the Government have spoken a lot about it, but it is not something that appears directly in the Bill. Clause 26(2) is actually the subsection that I am thinking of. If the Government have stated their intention to roll out this mandatory gateway as I have said, they have failed in our view to answer, particularly in another place, some fairly fundamental questions that need answering before Parliament should sanction such a departure from the present abundance of channels. Perhaps the Minister can illuminate us as to how the Government’s thinking has evolved on this issue, which I am sure they have spent a long time thinking about. When an individual with learning difficulties, for example, communication and speech problems or mental health problems tries to find help, will they be able to, first, find this new gateway service, secondly, properly access and understand the service and, thirdly, gain full utility from it? Will an individual who may be severely upset or traumatised—a victim of domestic violence, perhaps, or someone who is in extreme debt and feels rather ashamed about it—be willing to speak to a distant person without the comfort of direct, human interaction? Is it really the Government's case that they will all be happy to do that? How will someone who is utterly impecunious be able to make a lengthy telephone call, in which the caller refers to documents and must wait for interpreters and answer detailed questions, in anything close to an acceptable manner from, say, public telephone boxes, which still exist? For those with English as a foreign language, there may be a particular problem. There might be an interpreter, too; three-way conversations are hardly practicable. It will be difficult to consider documents over the phone. What if the caller is perhaps semiliterate or, in fact, illiterate? They will obviously need personalised help—the kind of help that they get at the moment. What if there is a mass of documents, only one or two of which are particularly relevant? Visually, someone obviously sifts through these papers, as they are using knowledge in a particular form that is relevant, but it could become a nightmare on the telephone. We think that those fears, which I am sure the Government have thought about, might prove an insurmountable hurdle to a number of those who, quite justifiably and within their rights, need legal advice or help. There are those with communication problems or mental health issues, those with learning difficulties or literacy issues, and those who just cannot express themselves in a particularly articulate way. Those who would be unwilling to use a phone need the immediacy of face-to-face contact and we fear that they may drop out. If the mandatory gateway is the only way through, will they actually get the advice that may solve the problem or get them their rights? There is an economic argument, too, because if telephone conversations become muddy and too long, with both parties struggling to make themselves understood while sifting through masses of paper and language difficulties, cost-efficiencies look much less likely. We think that there are ways of mitigating these issues, but at the moment there has been no proper debate about this issue. In a way, I am sorry that this debate is taking place in Committee at this time today, but it is still an opportunity for the Government to express their views and for other noble Lords to say whether or not they agree. On how this part of the Bill will actually work, we have little to guide us. We have Clause 26(2), but that gives us little insight into how it will work. I look forward to the debate on this issue in the time available to us. I end, I hope not too pretentiously, with this comment: when the great writer EM Forster talked about only connecting—““Only connect”” was his model for living—he was talking not about connecting two telephone wires but about human interaction. The Government should not discount human interaction when they or lawyers are in the business of giving advice on some of the matters that we have been discussing in this Committee. I beg to move.