Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

My Lords, the amendment deals with appeals where a court or tribunal certifies a complex point of law. The Judges’ Council, in response to the original consultation document, stressed the importance of continued funding for competent lawyers in meritorious cases. The problem is to identify which are the meritorious cases. Its response stated: "““Appeals before the Court of Appeal or the Supreme Court have to get through a demanding permission filter, frequently involve issues of difficulty and importance and may lead to the laying down of binding principles of broad application—a fortiori in the case of ‘second’ appeals to the Court of Appeal, which are subject to even stricter criteria requiring the appeal to raise an important point of principle or practice or that there is some other compelling reason why the appeal should be heard. References to the European Court of Justice relate to a difficult area of law and are made only where the answer is unclear. In appeals and references of this nature, the court ought to be given all possible assistance through professional advocacy. There should be no further cut-back in the availability of legal aid for such cases. The possibility of applying under the funding scheme for excluded cases is not a satisfactory answer, both because the scheme will be very limited in scope and because the very process of applying under the scheme is bound to be complicated and dissuasive””." Appeals are not only about the individual case before the court or tribunal; they often change the law, and make new law and law that is binding on later cases. There is a powerful public interest that both sides of the case are properly argued. It is the court or tribunal itself that is best placed to decide whether to trigger the operation of an appeal by issuing a certificate. The concept of exceptional funding under Clause 9 is excessively narrow in its scope, and I will be returning to that later. This amendment ensures that such cases remain, where appropriate, within the scope of legal aid and would retain the possibility of legal aid when the appeal is on a matter of significant wider public interest or there is some other compelling reason why legal services are required. I beg to move.