Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

My Lords, the purpose of Amendments 60 and 61 is to ask the Government to rectify an omission that denies legal aid to those who have been unlawfully deprived of their liberty by the state and their ability to obtain redress through the courts. The Government’s consultation resulted in legal aid being denied except for cases that concern a significant breach of human rights—abuses of positions of power or claims arising from allegations of sexual abuse or attack. Abuse of power by a public authority—which is itself a position of power—is defined in paragraph 19 of Schedule 1 as an act or omission that is deliberate or dishonest and results in reasonably foreseeable harm to a person or property. Unfortunately, however, the extent of the meaning of the words ““deliberate”” and ““harm”” in the Bill is not defined. Unless it is, I fear that based on past experience, immigration authorities and police will continue to disregard unlawful or false imprisonment on the grounds that ““deliberate”” means something more than merely unlawful, and ““harm”” means injury. Let me give an example of what I mean. A British man spent 19 months in an immigration detention centre pleading with the Home Office that he was British, but lacking the documents to prove it. His deportation appeal, for which he was unable to obtain representation due to the cuts in immigration legal aid, was dismissed. However, a solicitor gave him the benefit of the doubt and wrote to the Home Office saying that the onus was on it, as the detainer, to prove that the man was not British. Within two days of the letter, he was released. At this point, under the new proposals, no further legal aid would have been available because on the face of it, no harm—other than the loss of personal liberty for a period—had been caused by an inadvertent and honest mistake. However, after many hours of legal aid-funded work, evidence emerged of prolonged deceit on the part of the Home Office, resulting in substantial damages having to be paid. Because bringing claims for unlawful deprivation of liberty under a conditional fee agreement is beyond most people’s means now that legal expenses insurance premiums are no longer recoverable, most individuals placed in this situation have no means of gaining redress unless granted access to legal aid. Therefore, I am tabling both Amendment 60, which aims to make it clear that unlawful deprivation of an individual’s liberty by the state is a serious abuse of power, and Amendment 61, which aims to make it clear that unlawful loss of liberty constitutes harm, in the hope that the Government will accept that there is justification for the provision of legal aid in such cases of abuse of power by the state. I beg to move.