Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, has made a very powerful case for the amendment that he has so ably moved. We support it from the opposition Front Bench, very much for the reason that he was arguing in the latter part of his speech: the complete mismatch between being allowed to get legal aid to get advice on detention but not being able to get any advice as to the underlying reasons why an individual is detained. The Government are quite right to have recognised that legal aid is crucial when an individual’s liberty is at stake, and we see that principle in existence here in their preparedness to allow someone who is in detention to get legal advice to challenge that detention. However, how on earth can they challenge that detention—and this is the point the noble Lord was making—without also getting legal advice as to the underlying cause of that detention? It does not look as though this could work properly in practice. The Government are trying to hold fast to two principles: that an individual’s liberty demands legal aid advice; but, when that matter is looked into, the reason behind their loss of liberty cannot be advised on in the same way. The noble Lord, Lord Avebury, is quite right: some really serious mistakes will go uncorrected if this provision goes through. To make the point absolutely clearly—and this is the point that ILPA seems to have made—challenging immigration detention is inextricably linked to challenging the immigration decision that forms the justification for detention. If the Government want to help those detained wrongly—presumably they do; no one wants to have people detained wrongly—it is pretty self-evident that they should deal with the underlying problems. A failure to do so will simply mean a return to detention—a complete waste, frankly, of public money. Although I have been brief, we on this side believe that the noble Lord, Lord Avebury, and the others who signed the amendment have a very good point. I would like the Minister to explain to the Committee how these provisions can actually work in practice. It looks as though there is a serious mismatch between what they will and will not allow legal aid for in this field.