Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

My Lords, may I first thank noble Lords for their substantial and much appreciated support for these two amendments? The Government are undoubtedly to be congratulated on their strategy. They are also to be congratulated on opting in to the directive. It is the directive to which the Minister has just referred and it is the leading matter that we have to consider. The convention matters but the directive is part of English law and requires, "““access without delay to legal counselling, and … legal representation””." I have to say that I am disappointed by the Minister’s response. The Salvation Army, which got the contract for this work, is doing excellent work but it is expected to look after these women—they are generally women—for only up to 45 days. The fact that, out of the goodness of its heart, it keeps some of these people far beyond 45 days is not in the contract that the Government have with them. The Salvation Army is not in a position to put forward a case for exceptional funding, for instance. Until we see what sort of regulations and instructions are given to the director of legal aid about how he or she is to operate exceptional funding, I would be very unhappy that one can just say that any victim of trafficking who wanted to make a claim against traffickers, or against the CIB, has to go through the exceptional funding route. It may be extremely difficult to get into it and even more difficult to be recognised within it as someone who is in an exceptional position. Who is going to do that for a non-English person? We ought to look after our own people but we also ought to look after the people brought here against their will, or brought here misleadingly with promises that turn out not to be true. They are, in effect, dumped here or they escape. We have to look after them; we have a legal and moral duty to do so. Unless the Minister is able to say in due course that exceptional funding will specifically include claims by victims of human trafficking, his response will be inadequate. I should like him to go away and discuss with his advisers—and perhaps, as I asked a little earlier, with the Lord Chancellor—whether this very special and very small group of people should be specifically identified. I do not mind whether they are identified under exceptional funding or elsewhere, but they must not be left out on a limb. For the moment, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment. Amendment 61A withdrawn. Amendment 62 Moved by