Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

I have a number of anxieties about the impact of the Government’s proposals on children in painful and difficult situations. If the Minister can reassure me that my anxieties are misplaced I shall be more than pleased. However, I suspect that they are valid and that a number of amendments in this large group would be helpful. First, I am concerned about inequality of arms. Wealthy people will be able to go to court armed with their lawyers while people on modest incomes will not. They will therefore appear either as litigants in person or cave in and be defeated because they lack the legal advice and support that would allow their case to be heard on a fair basis. Secondly, legal aid is to be confined to cases of physical or sexual assault. Surely that is too narrow. It will leave unhappy children in inappropriate residential and contact arrangements, split off perhaps from siblings and grandparents. We should surely widen the range of circumstances in which legal aid is available in support of children in those situations. Thirdly, I think that there will be a perverse incentive. If an allegation of abuse would be a gateway to legal aid, some parents may be tempted to up the ante. In particular, we should be concerned that there may be cases where there has been some violence during the breakdown of the marriage or relationship but there is not a longstanding history of violence and there is no persuasive reason to suppose that there would be patterns of violence in the future; the violence has been generated by the crisis in the failure of the relationship. I do not think that it is in children’s interests that contact arrangements should be determined by such a factor. Of course, it will increase the private law workload of CAFCASS. Fourthly, there is possibly another perverse incentive if a trigger for legal aid is to be the existence of a formal child protection plan. Some parents may be tempted to allege child maltreatment when other forms of help would be more appropriate and better for the children. Clogging up the child protection system could be disastrous. Again, more private law cases could spin over to the children’s social care workload which is already staggering following the Baby P case and will be under immense pressure with the cuts to come. There will be more formal child protection investigations and more case conferences, often when a more consensual approach would be more in the interests of the child. I fear that there will be increased and prolonged bitterness between parents. Finally, while the Bill does not propose changes to legal aid for children and parents involved in public law care, clogging up the system with private law cases and litigants in person will have an adverse effect on the speedy resolution of such cases in the courts. That will be harmful, particularly to young children for whom it is very important to have a speedy return to permanent family arrangements, whether with parents, relatives or adopters.