Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

My Lords, I want to underline and strongly support one point made by my noble friend Lord Beecham, and referred to by the noble Baroness, Lady Howe, and that is the impact of these changes on the organisations that are providing just the alternative support that the Minister referred to. The Bill is about taking money away not just from lawyers but from organisations that are supporting people in an important time of need. I speak with some knowledge of this as I have had a long history in the pro bono movement. I declare an interest as chairman of the Access to Justice Foundation. One of the things that we do is to distribute regrettably small sums of money, because that is all we have, to organisations that support consumers and provide free legal advice and representation. Those small sums are going a long way towards helping people, but I know how much more is needed. I have seen organisations going to the wall, unable to continue because they depend and to some extent scrape by on a little bit of legal aid. I should very much like to hear from the Minister just how he and the Government believe that the alternative services to which he referred can continue in the light of the cuts that the Bill is making in this field.