Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

My Lords, like my noble friend Lady Massey, I want to draw attention to the impact of the proposals on quality of life. Like other noble Lords, I received a number of representations from organisations speaking out on behalf of various disadvantaged groups. Their representations bring home to me the need for a fine-grained impact analysis of the changes on people’s lives. The impact analysis that we have received does not provide that. I want to draw attention to a few of these groups—we will talk about them in much greater depth later. My noble friend spoke about children and young people. The group JustRights has written about the vulnerability of those who are able to access legal aid in their own right. It says that 80 per cent of young people who report civil legal problems face other disadvantages such as lone parenthood, mental health issues and exclusion from education, employment and training. The group refers to the range of legal issues that these young people may need help with, one of them being immigration. I spoke recently at a Law Society conference on social and economic human rights. A presentation was made by a group of young people from an organisation called Refugee Youth. Everyone at that conference was immensely impressed and moved by it. Afterwards, those young people wrote to me about the Bill. I hope that noble Lords will allow me to read from what they sent. They wrote: "““Many of us arrived as separated children, and have been through the asylum process. That has been successful for some of us, but not for all; and while many (not all) of us have been granted permission to stay in the UK, for some this has come from a non-asylum immigration claim””," which is relevant to this Bill. They continue: "““Indeed many of us have experience of being refused asylum, but granted permission to stay for up to 3 years; and having to bring an immigration claim and appeal at the end of that period … We are very worried about the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill, and the effect it will have on children and young people going through the immigration system in the future””." They are not talking about themselves; they are talking about other young people who might be in the same position. They mention that it was said in the House of Commons that such young people would be assigned a social worker but they say why that is not adequate. They do not feel confident that social workers would have—and there is no reason why they should have—the legal expertise to be able to help such young people. The organisation has produced a very useful briefing—I shall not read it all, obviously—in which it gives a number of reasons why it is so worried. It says: "““The court systems are intimidating and uncomfortable for young people … A court room is not made to be friendly, it is really intimidating. Having a lawyer makes you feel safe. As young people we feel we don’t have authority anywhere—let alone in a court room””." It then quotes from some young people. One said: "““I had a really good lawyer and even though she was with me going to court was still one of the scariest things I have ever been through””—" this was from someone who had sought asylum. Another said: "““When I just had to say my name in court I was so scared and stuttering and shaking—I can’t even imagine how scary it would be to represent myself””." Another young person said: "““It is too scary to relive traumatic experiences we have been through in court. Some things are too painful to represent ourselves””." The organisation then makes the point: "““Unaccompanied young people rely on the expertise and knowledge of lawyers to represent them … Often we come from countries where you can’t criticize the police or the government or any authority, so sometimes we don’t know when it’s safe to speak out and tell our story. We need advice and support from our lawyers. When a lawyer is involved matters are taken more seriously””." It is concerned about the quality of legal representation from private lawyers and the fact that they do not have the finances to pay for legal representation themselves. One individual said: "““If I hadn’t had that Legal Aid I don’t know what I would have done. I didn’t have a penny to pay for a lawyer and if I had to represent myself I would have no idea what evidence to provide””." The organisation concludes: "““From our personal and lived experiences as young people involved in the asylum and immigration system we are absolutely certain that the proposed changes will have a severely damaging impact on us and our peers””." Although that is a very subjective impact statement, it is rather telling and moving. We have had other representations, such as from the National Federation of Women’s Institutes, which welcomes the concessions that have been made around issues of domestic violence and immigration but points out that this will not cover all women who are potentially affected. We will need to look at that and more general issues around domestic violence as we go through the Bill. My noble friend Lord Howarth rightly said that it is probably unlawful to say that we should study only the impact on women, but we need a decent gender impact assessment of the Bill on the differential impacts on women and men. The withdrawal of legal aid from welfare law cases, I suspect, will show a disproportionately adverse impact on women because women are more likely to be claiming many of these benefits and are more likely to be living in poverty than are men. We have had briefings about disability. Scope produced a helpful impact report, Legal Aid in Welfare: The Tool We Can’t Afford to Lose, underlining how important the legal aid scheme is to disabled people, who again will be disproportionately affected by its removal from welfare law cases, and again underlining the importance of this at a time when the Government are making what they have said is the most radical reform of social security in 60 years. Important, too, as we have heard, is the impact on legal services and advice services, which we all know from the different parts of the country in which we live. I read recently in my local paper, the Nottingham Post, that it is feared that almost 3,000 people in Nottingham will be left without legal support and advice if government cuts to legal aid go ahead. There are fears that the Nottingham Law Centre could close following an 85 per cent drop in funding for legal services and that there could then be a knock-on effect with the contract that it gets from the local authority. CABs in Nottingham and Nottinghamshire are facing cuts. The example of one of them in Mansfield supports the case made by my noble friend Lord Bach about the knock-on costs of these cuts in legal aid. Mansfield CAB has had to make redundant the post for recruiting, training and supporting volunteers, so turning people who want to volunteer in the CAB away. What price the big society if that is the case? It is an example of the costs when a CAB has to turn away volunteers. As we scrutinise the Bill, noble Lords may have to inject a more high-quality impact assessment. However, I hope that it will not be left only to noble Lords, voluntary organisations and so on but that the Government will respond positively to my noble friend’s amendment.