Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

I am certain that the points that I and other noble Lords made were carefully considered by the Government, who I hope will continue to consider the points. My point was that frequently victims of domestic violence seek support other than from the authorities, for obvious reasons; they seek it from doctors, support organisations, social services and the like. Material from these sources should be acceptable as evidence for the purposes of the legal aid gateway. We can dress up the Government’s present scheme in any way we like, but the reality is that the legal aid budget will reduce as a direct result of the reluctance of many victims of intimate domestic violence to expose themselves and their children to the threat of more abuse by identifying and reporting their assailant to the authorities. That is unacceptable. Of course, we all hope that victims will come forward and seek protection for themselves and their children. It is important to give them every encouragement to do so. However, often they will not, and if they do not they should not be denied legal aid for that reason. The Government's justification for the Bill's approach is if anything less attractive than its substance: namely, that we need a conviction or some other officially reported evidence of abuse, in case women are tempted to make up allegations of assault in order to get legal aid. This is a rather depressing reinterpretation of the old stereotype of the woman who cries rape. Of course, women very occasionally invent allegations of rape but, in my experience both as a defence counsel and as chief prosecutor, these cases are exceedingly rare and very heavily outnumbered by cases in which the woman has been attacked. A vast and overwhelming number of women do not invent the attacks that have been visited on them. Domestic abuse is real and far too widespread, as I know the Secretary of State and the Minister realise and understand. It is particularly difficult to understand why the definition of domestic violence in this Bill is different and, on any analysis, narrower than the definition used by ACPO and the Crown Prosecution Service in detecting and prosecuting these crimes. I hope this is an accident. If it is, let the error be rectified at once. If it is not, let the Government think again. What possible justification can there be for this Bill to contain a definition of domestic violence that offers less protection to the victims of domestic violence than the definition used successfully day in and day out by our law enforcement agencies? If that is the reality, as I believe it is, this definition has no place in this Bill. I accept that the legal aid budget must reduce. It is for this reason that I am able to support, as the Minister knows, many of the reforms proposed by the Government. Indeed, I have no problem at all with some of the more controversial proposals, including competitive tendering for criminal legal aid, although this does not make me very popular with many of my professional colleagues, but I have a major problem—