Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

My Lords, I too support the amendment. When my noble and learned friend responds to this debate, it would be helpful if he would explain the relationship between the types of issues covered in the amendment and Clause 9. If he and the Government believe that there is nothing in the amendment that is not in fact or in law covered by Clause 9, it would be helpful if he would say so. I respectfully suggest that it would be better for these very important decisions to be made by judges and that we should avoid a potentially unnecessary layer of satellite litigation through judicial review of decisions of the director of civil legal aid. I suggest to my noble and learned friend that it is better that judges rather than an official determine whether there should be legal aid. I remind my noble and learned friend that the paradigm of the English claimant is the man on the Clapham omnibus, who may be coming to court with a very ordinary dispute. My noble and learned friend will recall, as a distinguished Scots lawyer, that one of the most important cases ever decided in the civil law in the United Kingdom related to a snail in a Scottish ginger beer bottle. Another of the most important cases in the common law arose from a carbolic smoke ball. One of the most important, if not the most important, cases in administrative law arose from the administrative arrangements for a cinema—a picture house—in Wednesbury in the Midlands. More recently, an extremely important case that led to a change in policy arose from a disabled person seeking guidance on her end-of-life care. That last one might have passed the test which I understand to be applied by Clause 9, but I believe that all four of those cases should in appropriate, means-tested circumstances be the recipients of legal aid and that the means test should be applied rather lightly if the outcome of the case has great importance in setting new precedent and our understanding of the law. In brief, I suggest to my noble and learned friend that the court is better placed than the director of civil legal aid to determine the importance of an issue in the panoply of precedent that the courts set.