Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

My Lords, I am beginning to feel rather sorry for the Minister as he listens to the debate because I can understand how the Government, faced with the deficit that they were faced with on the change of Government, had to look across the various departments to see where they would find money. I can see, too, working as I do in the court system—I declare an interest as the outgoing chair of the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service—that that looked like a pretty tasty budget. I also know that when you look across the range of expert witnesses there are times, certainly in my area, when there may be too many experts and that experts may prolong some cases. However, having said that, I support the amendment. This is because, having understood where the Government came from at the beginning, I do not understand why they are now unable to rethink, having been given all the evidence, of which we have heard a great deal today. I am not going to speak at length and give many more examples, but we have heard that there is a real need for an impact assessment, if not for social justice then for economic reality. I will give one example from my experience about cases that are in the private realm in the family court. We will have more cases brought by litigants in person. The evidence is that when litigants in person bring their cases, they take longer. The other evidence is that these families are of the 10 per cent who have not come to a conclusion themselves about what will happen to their children. That means that they are in the most difficult, complex situations that you can imagine. These families need more help. We find that the lawyers who represent them often act as mediators and cut through vast amounts of discussion and argument in order to shorten cases. That is another economic reason for making cases shorter. The more important one is that the sooner cases are resolved, the better it is for the children. The one thing that we have evidence about is that the longer cases are before the court and children are left in suspense about custody or any other issue, the more difficult it is for them. I hope that the Minister will listen to the arguments, difficult as it is for him placed where he is—he must be between a rock and a hard place. I do not believe that he is a man with a hard heart, so he must be listening to the arguments, but I realise that he is in a hard place economically. He is in the wrong place in that unless the Government look in some detail at some of these arguments—I speak only to the amendment and not to a range of other things—and have a decent impact assessment that goes into this in depth, there will be serious consequences. As the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, said, the reason why this was not done in the beginning was that it was in the too-difficult box. These situations are difficult but they are assessable.